Pinball Construction Set

Bill Budge was a fairly important name before Pinball Construction Set, game designers weren't celebrated much in the early 80s so he was a bit of an outlier. (It wasn't until titles like this from new houses like Electronic Arts that designers would be celebrated like rock stars, packaging their games in gatefolds like they were smaller LPs so gamers could start to get to know who was behind our obsession.) But while researching Ultima the other day, I happened upon a scan of the original manual. And there, among the other California Pacific Computer Co. titles is Bill Budge's Space Album described as "Four HiRes space arcade games from the famous Bill Budge..." You don't hear much about that game, but than again, you can't see the stars when the sun is shining, can you?

For all intents and purposes, this was Budge's last game. Yeah, he was involved when a version of PCS ended up on the Genesis as Virtual Pinball, and later followed Trip Hawkins to 3DO to do some graphics work there. But this was the last time he really wrote a game, and it was undoubtedly his best. That being said, of course, it's not a game. No, it's really about creating games, specifically pinball games and giving you all the tools you needed to build your own. Add bumpers, place flippers, line up spinners, design the curves, change the number of balls, even play with the physics of the ball movement.

You even had a mini graphics editor to add custom logos, design the board at the pixel level. Now let's put this in perspective, in 1982 (or 1983 when most people found this) your computer typically came with a version of Basic, and well that was it. You didn't get a calculator, disk operations were done through arcane commands, and you certainly didn't get anything like Microsoft Paint. Graphical interfaces didn't exist outside of experimental projects or the overpriced and underpowered Apple Lisa. PCS' image editor was powerful enough that there are stories of people running the software solely to make and edit pixel graphics. And ultimately, there lies PCS' really impressive feat -- it was a nearly Knuthian[1] project of creation where he created the GUI interface to manipulate the playboard in a drag and drop concept, built all of the sliders and controls for the interface widgets, and yeah threw in some editing tools. Ultimately Budge would end up writing a graphics editor for the Apple II and that weird little square thing graphics people called a mouse. The most amazing thing was how easy it was to use. Literally, I learned GUI concepts from this game years before I knew anyone with a Mac or Commodore Amiga or saw the Windows 2.0 interface.

After you designed your masterpiece, you could save your games and give them to friends to play. "Yeah but they had to buy the game too..." Nope. The save files were complete with a runtime. As long as your friend had the same platform and a disk drive, she could play your creations. Pretty cool, and 10 years before we'd be blown away as the mod scene started to explode behind WAD editors for the FPS games. PCS was like a look into the future -- hey one day you'll manipulate your computer with a pointer, and be able to freely write modifications to existing games, yeah you'll do weird things to play with the physics and show your friends. All there, in PCS.

Yeah, and after all that, you could play a decent game of pinball, with sound effects, score tracking, and a fairly responsive feel. Budge had already been down the road of making an entertaining pinball game on the computer with Raster Blaster so default settings made for a pretty good game. But there you were, with a game you created, one you built. PCS was just a bit of magic, and I don't blame for Budge for effectively dropping the mic and leaving gaming, it wasn't his thing. He's the type of person who builds the tools that other people use to do their thing. And he was a genius at it. Thank you, Bill.

For 1982, this was stunning as a game editor, though playing it today you would laugh at its limitations(The Apple II version lacks ball respawns for example). Still, I think it's fascinating that Pinball Construction Set developed an iconography we take for granted today(taken from the Apple LISA), such as the mouse symbol, a hammer, a saw, a paintbrush... it's really basic stuff today, and probably the first time we see a game where "it is only limited by your imagination" was its own goal.