Pinball Construction Set

Pinball Construction Set (PCS) is a computer game by Bill Budge published by Electronic Arts. It was released for the Apple II and Atari 800 in 1983 and was later ported to other platforms, such as the Commodore 64 and DOS (as a booter). Pinball Construction Set created a new genre of computer games—the "builder" or "construction set" class of games. With PCS, users can construct their own virtual pinball arcade machine, by dropping controls onto a table. Controls included bumper, flipper, spinner and other standard pinball paraphernalia. Attributes such as gravity and the physics model could also be modified. Users could save their creations and develop custom artwork to go along with them. Tables could be saved on floppy disk and freely traded. Budge originally published and distributed this game via his publishing "company" (really just him and his sister), BudgeCo. In the more competitive publishing era of the 1980s, however, he willingly allowed EA to publish his game when...