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. 1954 was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ... John Carmack is one of the most widely recognized and influential game programmers. ... A game designer is a person who designs games. ... 1981 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1983 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Box cover of Pinball Construction Set Pinball Construction Set (PCS) is a computer game by Bill Budge published by Electronic Arts. ... The Apple II was one of the most popular personal computers of the 1980s. ...

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 Computers 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$7000. Pong, an adaptation of table tennis to the video screen, was the first commercially successful video game and is widely regarded as ushering in the video game era. ... Apple Computer, Inc. ... A Centronics connector (Top) Centronics is a manufacturer of dot matrix computer printers formerly based in Hudson, New Hampshire. ... A computer printer is a computer peripheral device that produces a hard copy (permanent human-readable text and/or graphics, usually on paper) from data stored in a computer connected to it. ... Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School of Computer Science Open Directory Project: Computer Science Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies Belief that title science in computer science is inappropriate Categories: Computer science ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, UC Berkeley, UCB, or simply Berkeley) is a prestigious, public, coeducational university situated in the foothills of Berkeley, California to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate and its bridge. ... A floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a circular piece of thin, flexible (i. ... Disk Drive is the afternoon show on CBC Radio Two. ... The United States dollar, or American dollar, is the official currency of the United States. ...

Budge went on to write fast graphics libraries for game programmers. He stated that was where his real love was: Computer graphics (CG) is the field of visual computing, where one utilizes computers both to generate visual images synthetically and to integrate or alter visual and spatial information sampled from the real world. ... In computer science, a library is a collection of subprograms used to develop software. ...

"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

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 processor. Pinball is a type of coin-operated arcade game where a player attempts to score points by manipulating one or more metal balls on a playfield inside a glass case. ... 1981 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... When stuff moves. ... This CPU uses numerous pins to connect to the motherboard. ...

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. So when approached by Electronic Arts (EA) to publish his games, he willingly signed on. Video game publishers are companies that publish video games that they have either developed internally or have had developed by a video game developer. ... Ziploc is a brand of resealable plastic bags and containers originally developed by Dow Chemical Company, and now produced by S. C. Johnson & Son. ... A small, much-used Xerox copier in a high school library. ... 1983 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Entrepreneur is an import from the same French word. ... Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS) is a leading video game developer and publisher. ...

With BudgeCo and EA's distribution, Pinball Construction Set eventually sold an astounding 300,000 copies over all platforms.

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.

Budge left the game industry to semi-retirement in the mid-1980s in the San Francisco Bay Area. The computer and video game industry is the economic sector involved with the development, marketing and sale of video and computer games. ... // Events and trends The 1980s marked an abrupt shift towards more conservative lifestyles after the momentous cultural revolutions which took place in the 60s and 70s and the definition of the AIDS virus in 1981. ... The San Francisco Bay Area, referred to as The Bay Area by its residents, is a metropolitan area that lies along the San Francisco Bay. ...

He 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, he ported Pinball Construction Set to the Sega Genesis (under the title Virtual Pinball), one of the hottest platforms at the time. Shortly afterward, he went to go work for the ill-fated 3DO, creating a 3D engine for Bladeforce. // Events and trends The 1990s are generally classified as having moved slightly away from the more conservative 1980s, but keeping the same mind-set. ... John Carmack, one of the worlds leading game programmers, working on Doom 3 using an IDE. Game programming is a subset of game development. ... Sega Genesis 2 The Sega Genesis is a 16-bit video game console released by Sega in North America in 1989. ... The 3DO Company (formerly THDO on the NASDAQ stock exchange) was founded in 1991 under the name SMSG, Inc. ... The rewrite of this article is being devised at Talk:3D computer graphics/Temp. ... In computing, a game engine is the core software component of a video game. ...

References

1. Google cache of an interview with Budge

External links

• MobyGames' entry on Budge
• Budge entry from the NNDB