Bill Budge (446 Words)

As the first person in gaming history to be described as “famous”, Bill Budge is a renowned computer game programmer and designer. With two main claims to fame being 1981’s Raster Blaster – a pinball game for the Apple 2 and 1983’s Pinball Construction Set for the Apple 2 and Atari 800. Making him the best known game designer in North America in the early eighties.

Starting out by creating Penny Arcade a clone of the classic Pong game using his own custom graphics. He traded the computer game with Apple Computers for a Centronics printer. While still a graduate at The University of California, Berkeley United States of America (USA) studying Computer Science. He continued to produce other game which he tired to market commercially. Whilst teaming up with floppy disk salesmen, generating fifty percent profit for his creations he managed to receive a first pay check of 7,000 USD.

With this inspiration in mind he proceeded to create faster graphics libraries for game programmers stating:

“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.”

While working for Apple Computer in 1981 Bill Budge became interested in writing a pinball game. Raster Blaster was created and prevented challengers for the Apple 2, such as physics and collision detection that were too much for the limitations of the processor.

After creating Raster Blaster, BudgeCo was founded with the intentions of the company handling the distribution of his games. In 1983 the game publishing arena became too much and he decided to produce games instead of becoming an entrepreneur. He was later approached by Trip Hawkins (founder of EA) to publish his games which he agreed to and later produced Pinball Construction Set. Towards the mid 1980’s he decides to leave the games industry to semi-retirement in the San Francisco Bay Area California USA.

Returning in the 1990’s working only on work he enjoyed he decided he preferred programming and developing something cutting edge. Later he decided to port his Pinball Construction Set (under the new title Virtual Pinball) to one of the hottest platforms of that time the SEGA Genesis.

Towards the mid nineties he went to work for 3DO, a computer console developer before switching to game developer, developing a game engine for the computer game Bladeforce. He remained at the company until bankruptcy in 2003 where he returned to Electronic Arts (EA) for less than two years. In 2004 he joined Sony Computer Entertainment as Lead Tools Programmer.