learning how the game's integrated circuits worked, and began modifying the game. He developed Elepong (similar to Pong), one of Japan's earliest locally produced arcade video games, released in 1973. He produced more than ten video games up until 1977, before Space Invaders was released in 1978. Most-known games Sky Fighter and Sky Fighter II Nishikado developed Sky Fighter, a target shooting electro-mechanical game released by Taito for amusement arcades in 1971. The game used mirrors to project images of model planes in front of a moving sky-blue background from a film canister on a rotating drum. The game was a hit, but too large for most locations, so it was followed by a scaled-down version, Sky Fighter II, which sold 3,000 arcade cabinets. Soccer and Davis Cup His first original arcade video games were the Pong-style sports video games Soccer and Davis Cup, with Soccer developed first but both released in November 1973. Davis Cup was a team sport video game, a tennis doubles game with similar ball-and-paddle gameplay to Pong but played in doubles, allowing up to four players to compete, like Atari's Pong Doubles (1973) released the same year. Soccer was also a team sport video game, based on association football. Soccer was also a ball-and-paddle game like Pong, but with a green background to simulate a playfield, allowed each player to control both a forward and a goalkeeper, and let them adjust the size of the players who were represented as paddles on screen. It also had a goal on each side. Nishikado considers Soccer to be Japan's first original domestically produced video game, in comparison to Japanese Pong clones released earlier, including Sega's Pong Tron and Taito's Elepong. TV Basketball was an arcade basketball video game released by Taito in April 1974. It was designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, who wanted to move beyond simple rectangles to character graphics. Taito released the game in Europe as Basketball in 1974. It was the earliest use of character sprites to represent human player characters in a video game. The gameplay was largely similar to earlier ball-and-paddle games, but with human-like characters rather than simple rectangles. Nishikado came up with the concept by taking "a typical pong game" and rearranging the shapes so that they looked like objects such as a basketball hoop. It was also the earliest basketball video game in arcades, and the second basketball-themed video game