Pinball Construction Set

About Pinball Construction Set

Pinball Construction Set (1982) is Bill Budge's Apple II program for building and playing your own pinball tables with drag-and-drop parts, which created the construction set genre and which Steve Wozniak called the greatest program ever written for an 8-bit machine.

Pinball Construction Set in Depth

Users build their own virtual pinball machines by dropping bumpers, flippers, spinners and other parts onto a table, then play them. Attributes such as gravity and the physics model can be changed, and finished tables can be saved to floppy disk and freely traded, since Pinball Construction Set is not needed to play them. Its Lisa-like graphical interface, with representative icons and drag-and-drop table building, was for thousands of people their first experience of a GUI.

Computer Gaming World considered it revolutionary and said "there's something almost magical about the way this product works", noting that the nine-page manual was "overkill" since an eight-year-old had no trouble building tables. BYTE praised Budge's "marvelous sense of programming" and its encouragement of creativity, InfoWorld compared its importance to Scott Adams's Adventureland, and Compute! called it "a programming work of art". Orson Scott Card said his son used it as a graphics program.

Making Pinball Construction Set

Budge, already a celebrity among Apple II owners for Raster Blaster, began it in July 1982 because he did not want to make another game ("all the current (arcade) games are either maze games or Pong") and was experimenting with his own tools. He was aware of the Apple Lisa and Xerox PARC's GUI research and modelled the interface on them. It was ambitious for the Apple's limited memory and graphics. BudgeCo published it in late 1982, but it sold poorly without a large distribution network, so Budge agreed when Trip Hawkins approached him in 1983, and Electronic Arts released it with Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 versions, followed by IBM PC and Mac versions in 1985. It sold over 300,000 copies. Computer Gaming World ranked it the most innovative computer game in 1996, EA followed it with Music, Adventure and Racing Destruction sets, Will Wright cited it as an inspiration, and Budge released the Atari 8-bit source code on GitHub in 2013.