Making a videogame used to be something to which only the highest-level geeks could aspire. And then Bill Budge came along.
As one of the prototypical computer hackers of the early 1980s, Budge loved to program his Apple II computer, and he loved all the money he was making creating and selling games out of his house.
What he wasn’t really into was game design. He savored the challenge of working with low-level instructions to coax high performance out of a simple machine, but he wasn’t into making the levels. So after creating a successful pinball videogame for the Apple II called Raster Blaster, Budge hit on a revolutionary idea for his next title: Just build the parts and let the users make their own pinball tables.
The resultant game, called Pinball Construction Set, is considered to be the first game built around user-generated content. Besides its graphical user interface – quite unique for 1983 – its ability to let players create and play their own game designs was the inspiration for a host of hit DIY games to come, from SimCity to LittleBigPlanet.
Budge’s name isn’t nearly as recognizable as those of some of his contemporaries. But the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences will award him its second annual Pioneer Award on Feb. 10 in recognition of his trailblazing efforts, the group has revealed exclusively to Wired.com. Budge joins Pitfall! creator David Crane in the honor.
“Pinball Construction Set is one of the giants on which LittleBigPlanet stands,” said David Smith, co-founder of Media Molecule, in an e-mail to Wired.com.
SimCity creator Will Wright offered similar plaudits for Budge’s groundbreaking work. “Pinball Construction Set was the first game that introduced me to the idea of constructive games and systemic thinking,” Wright said in a statement forwarded by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. “I doubt SimCity would have existed without it.”
The Birth of BudgeCo
As the 1980s began, Budge was working every computer programmer’s dream job, writing the graphics driver for the Apple III computer. The seeds for his breakout hit game were planted by a group of pinball fanatics at the company that included Steve Wozniak among its members.
“They were students of the game,” Budge says, “talking about catches, and how to pass the ball from flipper to flipper, and they really got into it. And I would go and watch them play and listen to them talk about it.”