Western Gun, was created by Tomohiro Nishikado for Taito. The game's concept was adapted from a Sega arcade electro-mechanical game, also called Gun Fight, which was released in 1969. In that game, two players control cowboy figurines on opposing sides of a playfield full of obstacles, with each player attempting to shoot the opponent's cowboy. The cowboy figurines were adapted into character sprites, with both players able to maneuver across a landscape while shooting each other. It was the second game by Nishikado to use human character sprites, after a 1974 sports video game he designed for Taito, Basketball, which was released as TV Basketball by Midway in North America. Taito licensed Western Gun to Midway for release in North America, one of the first such licenses, after the 1974 scrolling racing game Speed Race, also designed by Nishikado, and the 1974 sports game Basketball. The title Western Gun, while making perfect sense for Japanese audiences in that it conveyed the setting and theme as simply as possible, sounded odd to American audiences, so it was renamed Gun Fight for its American localization. Taito's version was based on discrete logic. When Dave Nutting adapted the game for Midway, he decided to base it on the Intel 8080, which made Gun Fight the first video game to use a microprocessor. Nutting's company Dave Nutting Associates had already used microprocessor technology in prototypes of arcade pinball machines, and the first arcade pinball machine to include a microprocessor, The Spirit of '76 by Mirco Games, used this technology under license. Midway's version, which had a black-and-white raster monitor with a transparent yellow screen overlay, used bitmapped framebuffer technology to display the game text and graphics, including its animated human-like characters. To make the animation fast and smooth, the game included a special barrel shifter circuit built from multiple discrete chips. The microprocessor used this to shift each pattern of picture bits, byte-by-byte, to the proper horizontal bit offset, reading back each shifted byte and then writing it into the framebuffer. The 8080, like other microprocessors of its era, had shift instructions that could only shift by a single bit position. With the shifter circuit, the microprocessor could quickly shift a picture byte by several bit positions, giving it more time for other work. A similar shifter circuit was used in later Midway and Taito games whose hardware was based on Gun Fight, such