In 1967 a young engineering graduate failed the final round of Sony’s hiring test. That rejection pushed Tomohiro Nishikado toward Taito, where he went from building electromechanical amusement machines with mirrors and plastic model airplanes to reverse engineering an imported Pong cabinet and, eventually, building Space Invaders entirely by himself. This episode traces how one solitary hardware engineer’s path mirrors the birth of the modern video game industry.

We follow Nishikado through TV Basketball, the first game to use human character sprites, Speed Race with its vertical scrolling and racing wheel, and Western Gun, the first game to depict human-to-human combat and introduce dual-stick controls. Then we get into Space Invaders itself: why the enemies became aliens instead of airplanes or soldiers, why the background had to be black, how a processor bottleneck turned into the game’s famous speeding heartbeat, and how a single arcade cabinet inspired Shigeru Miyamoto and launched the golden age of arcades.

• How a chance meeting at a train station led Nishikado to Taito in 1968 and the mechanical marvel Sky Fighter
• Six months spent tracing the physical logic gates of a Pong cabinet with no code to read
• Why Midway rebuilt Western Gun with a microprocessor and how that convinced Nishikado software was the future
• The hardware and moral constraints that shaped Space Invaders’ aliens, black void, and high score table
• Over $1 billion grossed by 1981, 360,000 cabinets sold, and a legacy shared by every shooter since