A solo Japanese developer transformed Breakout into the arcade hit Space Invaders.

Evidence

In 1977, Tomohiro Nishikado’s boss at the Tokyo firm Taito, a manufacturer of jukeboxes and arcade games, asked him to make a Japanese version of the American video game Breakout.* Earlier in his career Nishikado had done the same with Atari’s Pong, resulting in Elepong, which proved a modest success, making him the natural choice. Nishikado took the assignment, and for some reason decided to carry it out entirely alone. Working long hours, he made substantial changes to the original. The opponents now moved across and down the screen, dropping bombs on the player’s paddle, now transformed into a crude artillery unit, capable of firing back laser beams in response. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 676

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how a single overworked Japanese developer’s solo redesign of a licensed American game birthed the global video-game boom and inaugurated Japan as gaming’s dominant attention merchant.
• QUESTION: Nishikado chose to work entirely alone — worth investigating the working conditions and why Taito allowed a single person to carry the project.