By the early 1980s the game was becoming harder to sell, so to help clear out inventory, Yokoyama was tasked with creating two new games that could run on the Namco Galaxian board. The first of these was "King & Balloon" (1980), a fixed shooter that is cited as the first video game to incorporate speech. The second game was instead made for newer hardware as suggested by Namco's Research & Development division. This new arcade board was named the Namco Galaga, and used in games including "Bosconian" (1981) and "Dig Dug" (1982). Although Yokoyama was not given explicit instructions to make a shooting game, management expressed desire for him to make a game similar to "Galaxian". Initial planning for the project took two months.