He began conducting his own science experiments at an early age and, in junior high school, started working with electronics by building radios and amplifiers.

[3] He developed Elepong (similar to Pong), one of Japan's earliest locally produced arcade video games, released in 1973.

[4][5] 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.

[14] The gameplay was largely similar to earlier ball-and-paddle games, but with human-like characters rather than simple rectangles.

[3] 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.

[15] In February 1974, TV Basketball became the earliest non-American video game to be licensed for release in North America, with a deal initially made with Atari.

[7] It sold 1,400 arcade cabinets in the United States, a video game production record for Midway, up until the release of Wheels.

The game's most important innovation was its introduction of scrolling graphics, where the sprites moved along a vertical scrolling overhead track,[20] with the course width becoming wider or narrower as the player's car moves up the road, while the player races against other rival cars, more of which appear as the score increases.

[6] Other features of the game included obstacles such as a cactus,[33] and in later levels, pine trees and moving wagons, that can provide cover for the players and are destructible.

[28][41] Gun Fight's success helped pave the way for Japanese video games in the American market.

[1][47][48] Space Invaders pitted the player against multiple enemies descending from the top of the screen at a constantly increasing speed.

As with subsequent shoot 'em ups of the time, the game was set in space as the available technology only permitted a black background.

[51] As one of the earliest shooter games, it set precedents and helped pave the way for future titles and for the shooting genre.

[52][53] Space Invaders popularized a more interactive style of gameplay with the enemies responding to the player controlled cannon's movement.

[52] It was also the first game where players had to repel hordes of creatures,[46] take cover from enemy fire, and use destructible barriers,[57] in addition to being the first game to use a continuous background soundtrack, with four simple chromatic descending bass notes repeating in a loop, though it was dynamic and changed pace during stages.

[4] Under Dreams when it was owned by Nishikado, his credited games include Bust-A-Move Millennium, published by Acclaim Entertainment in 2000.

[69] Dreams is also credited for Chase HQ: Secret Police published by Metro3D for the Game Boy Color in 1999, the 3D eroge visual novel Dancing Cats published by Illusion for the PC in 2000, Super Bust-A-Move (Super Puzzle Bobble) published by Taito for the PlayStation 2 in 2000, Rainbow Islands (Bubble Bobble 2) and Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder for the Game Boy Color in 2001, and the 2008 Nintendo DS version of Ys I & II.

[69] Dreams was involved in the development of the fighting game Battle Fantasia, released by Arc System Works in 2008.