Bill Budge
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Bill Budge (born ~1954) is a computer game programmer and designer. His two main claims to fame are 1981's Raster Blaster and 1983's seminal Pinball Construction Set. Both these games were released originally for the Apple II. In the early to mid-1980s Budge was the best known game designer in North America, and the first person in the industry to legitimately be described as famous.
Early games
Budge's first game was a Pong clone, called "Penny Arcade", which he wrote using his own custom graphics routines. He traded the completed game to Apple Computer for a Centronics printer. While a graduate student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, he went on to make other games, which he tried to market commercially. Teaming up with a floppy disk drive salesman (8" floppy disks!) who travelled from store to store, he and the salesman agreed to split profits of selling his games 50/50. Budge was shocked when he got his first check for USD$7,000.
Budge then proceeded to write fast graphics libraries for game programmers. He stated that was where his real love was:
- "I wasn't that interested in playing or designing games. My real love was in writing fast graphics code. It occurred to me that creating tools for others to make games was a way for me to indulge my interest in programming without having to make games."1
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 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.
After writing Raster Blaster, Budge found 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 didn't 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 BudgeCo and EA's distribution, Pinball Construction Set eventually sold an astounding 300,000 copies over all platforms. In the first half of the 1980s Budge was the best-known game designer in North America, in part because of the quality of his titles and in part because the EA marketing blitz featured his photo in rock star settings.
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.
After EA
Budge left the game industry to semi-retirement in the mid-1980s in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Budge returned in the 1990s after deciding that he only liked working when he enjoyed the work. By this point he had decided that he liked game programming as long as he was developing something cutting-edge. To this end, Budge ported Pinball Construction Set (under the title Virtual Pinball) to the Sega Genesis, one of the hottest platforms at the time.
Shortly afterward, Budge went to go work for the 3DO, creating a 3D engine for Bladeforce. He remained with the company for nine years until its demise in 2003. Budge returned to EA but stayed for less than two years. He joined Sony Computer Entertainment in 2004 as Lead Tools Programmer.
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