Taito Designers Speak

Edge Magazine has conducted an interview with Tomohiro Nishikado and Fukio Mitsuji, designers of classic Taito arcade titles. Nishikado was responsible for the immortal Space Invaders and Mitsuji for the well-loved Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands. The responses from Nishikado in particular are fascinating for their perspective on just how differet game development was in his day.

"It was very a difficult process. The hardest part was the development of a microcomputer. Microcomputers were hardly used at that time in Japan, so we had to create one from scratch. I could almost say developing the microcomputer was harder than developing the game itself. These days, we have personal computers to rely on, but there was no programming environment back then. So I had to create everything by myself. I created a development device, wrote a part of the game that runs on it, and then created more devices along the way."