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."
By this point, Budge had already made considerable money selling games he'd created for the Apple II in his spare time. When he was in college, he'd traded the rights to his first game, a collection of Pong clones called Penny Arcade, to Apple in exchange for a $700 Centronics printer.
Later, he met a traveling salesman who sold 8-inch floppy disks to computer stores. The salesman offered to sell them copies of Budge's games, in the then-traditional "disk in a Baggie" format, and split the profits with Budge. When the first check came in, it was for a whopping $7,000.
Not bad for what Budge calls "some very quick knockoffs" of games like Asteroids, written in about one week each.
Budge put considerably more effort into his pinball game, which he named Raster Blaster. "It struck me that it was the kind of thing that could be done on the Apple II," he said. "The graphics weren't that intensive – a very small part of the screen that changes at any one time." Mostly, though, Budge wanted to impress Woz and his pinball buddies.
"I wanted to see if I could build it as a technical exercise," Budge said. "Making it fun to play was kind of secondary."
Just as he was finishing Raster Blaster, Budge decided he could make more money if he cut out the middleman and went into business for himself. So he left Apple and founded BudgeCo, a two-person operation that he ran with his sister. She handled the business side; he wrote the games.
"We bought a glue machine, and bought a shrink-wrap machine, and made the packaging. It was very doable for a couple of people," he said.
Budge's sister had hundreds of stores all over the country as her clientele, and BudgeCo would ship them copies of Raster Blaster directly. Eventually, BudgeCo would sell tens of thousands of disks at once to distributors, who would take care of the rest.
All the while, Budge worked on his new idea, Pinball Construction Set.
Bill Budge, Rock Star
While Budge was at work on the failed Apple III, there was another project at Apple that grabbed his attention – Lisa, the first personal computer with a graphical user interface.
"You could, using that, build some pretty powerful creativity apps," said Budge. He started building Pinball Construction Set based on an idea he got from a primitive Lisa art program that let users drag a magnifying glass around a screen and paint pixels. Then, he added code that would let users move a polygon around a screen, dragging its vertices to create shapes.
The hard part, Budge says, was collision detection – making sure the ball bounced off the parts, and at the correct angle. With Raster Blaster, he was able to individually tweak each part of the screen until it worked. With this new game, users could place their parts anywhere, so it all had to be done on the fly.
The other wrinkle was that the Apple II did not yet have a mouse. Budge would eventually help create one and write the MousePaint program for it, but in 1983 the only tools available were game controllers – Pong paddles and joysticks.
"I'm sure we would consider it horrible to use today," he said. But he made it work, using one paddle to position the cursor horizontally and the other for vertical movement, like an Etch A Sketch.
Budge originally released Pinball Construction Set through BudgeCo, but the game was a slow mover. Luckily for him, he was constantly being pestered by Trip Hawkins, the founder of a new company called Electronic Arts.
"Trip was really pushing, and I was kind of stubborn," Budge said. "I didn't totally trust anybody else."
Hawkins wanted game developers to be treated like rock stars. He believed they should be famous, making television appearances and signing autographs. Electronic Arts' games were sold in what the company called "album covers," LP-size sleeves with exotic artwork. One of the biggest things on the cover of Pinball Construction Set was Budge's name.
Moreover, Electronic Arts was better at the business side. The company had a marketing firm, and it could hire contractors to port the game. Budge had written Pinball Construction Set for his first love, the Apple II, but the versions EA commissioned for the IBM PC and Commodore 64 sold far more copies.
Budge's boyish good looks helped make him an ideal member of EA's crew of videogame rock stars. He was pictured wearing a spiked wrist cuff in the company's infamous early advertisement, a portrait of the designers next to the question, "Can a Computer Make You Cry?"
I didn't look like a typical hacker."A lot of people were fascinated with this whole thing, computer hackers," he says. "I didn't look like a typical hacker, like a real oddball kind of character."
Budge did tons of magazine interviews and appeared on television multiple times, including Charlie Rose. ("He knew absolutely nothing; he seemed like your typical blow-dried guy without a lot of substance," Budge recalls. "But I guess I was wrong about him.")
Electronic Arts even sent Budge on a personal-appearance tour with his fellow "Can a Computer Make You Cry?" developers. At a Lechmere store in Boston, Budge showed up in his casual clothes, ready to sign some autographs.
The manager, recalls Budge, was aghast: "Wait a minute, you guys are going to be behind the counter selling games! You can't wear a T-shirt and sneakers in Lechmere!" So Budge had to hit the store floor and buy a new wardrobe, then stand behind the counter and ring up sales.
"That's when I realized maybe I wouldn't be a rock star," he says.
After Pinball Construction Set, Budge entered what he calls his "wilderness period," five years mostly spent windsurfing and tooling around with an even bigger dream called Construction Set Construction Set – that is, a game that would let you build any sort of game you could imagine. It eventually proved just too complicated a project.
Budge spent more time with EA in the '90s, creating a Sega Genesis version of his landmark game that it released as Virtual Pinball. Soon after, he took a job with game publisher 3DO, where he stayed on for nine years, programming its games. Stints at EA and Sony followed, leading to Budge's current job at Google, where he is hard at work on Native Client.
Although he has worked in the game industry almost his entire life, Budge's breakout hit was the last game he was personally known for. But by inspiring an entire genre of games, Budge played an integral role in putting power into players' hands.
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