Raster Blaster and Pinball Construction Set
Budge first became interested in writing a pinball game while working for Apple in 1981. There was a pinball craze going on among the engineers there and it occurred to him that a pinball game would be a fun programming challenge. At that point he wrote Raster Blaster, which presented some significant challenges under the Apple II. Things like physics and collision detection were brutal with the limited facilities of the Apple II's 1 MHz 6502 processor.
From this initial pinball game, it was a small step to writing an entire construction set. Budge notes that it also required him to write a mini-paint program, a mini sound editor and save/load systems. Some of the components he already had, which he developed for Raster Blaster.
After writing Raster Blaster, Budge founded his own company, BudgeCo, taking over the responsibility of what his publishers were doing. He printed copies of his games and put them in a Ziploc bag with a photocopy of the game's instructions.
By 1983, however, the computer game publishing arena had become too complex for Budge's taste, who did not really want to be an entrepreneur. When he was approached by Electronic Arts (EA) founder Trip Hawkins (whom he had met when they both worked at Apple) to publish his games, he discussed the idea with Steve Wozniak and willingly signed on. With EA's distribution, Pinball Construction Set eventually sold 300,000 copies over all platforms. Budge's name became well-known among gamers, because of EA's "rockstar" promotion of game designers (other designers who received similar treatment were Dan Bunten, Anne Westfall, and Jon Freeman).
Part of EA's rockstar promotion was sending their programmers out on autograph tours. Budge was included in this and went around signing the "album cover" packages of his game published by EA.
They also assembled several developers and hired a Hollywood photographer for taking a photograph in rockstar pose which led to EA's famous We See Farther advertising poster.
After PCS, Budge toyed with the idea of creating Construction Set Construction Set but abandoned the idea after determining it was too complex a concept. He did, however, create the 3-D Graphics Tool, a program that allowed rudimentary creation of wire-frame graphical images for use in games or other applications.
Pinball Construction Set is an inductee in GameSpy's Hall of Fame.
Read more about this topic: Bill Budge
Famous quotes containing the word construction:
“There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)