Bill Budge
American video game programmer and designer
Bill Budge (born August 11, 1954) is a retired American video game programmer and designer. He is best known for the Apple II games Raster Blaster (1981) and Pinball Construction Set (1983).
Early games
Budge says he became interested in computers while obtaining a PhD at UC Berkeley. He purchased an Apple II and began writing games. He enjoyed it so much that he dropped out of school and became a game programmer. Budge's first game was a Pong clone, called Penny Arcade, which he wrote using his own custom graphics routines. He traded the completed game to Apple Computer for a Centronics printer. California Pacific published a collection of four of Budge's Apple II games in 1980 as Bill Budge's Space Album.
An audience applauded with "audible gasps of astonishment" Raster Blaster and other uses of his graphics libraries at the 1981 National Computer Graphics Association conference.
By then Budge's reputation was such that BYTE wrote in its review of his Tranquility Base, a Lunar Lander clone, that "Consistently excellent graphics are a trademark of Bill Budge's games", and InfoWorld described him as "graphics programmer extraordinaire".
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4908321. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1954, 1981, 1983 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bill Budge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.