History of the Pinball Construction Set

Matt Barton writes "I thought you all might enjoy our article on the history of Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set, a key progenitor to LittleBigPlanet and other games that enable users to generate their own shareable content. The article is heavily illustrated and covers the game's precedents as well as those it influenced (Bard's Tale Construction Set, Racing Destruction Set, etc.) Budge said, 'I was exposed to GUIs at Apple, and I had the pinball simulation from Raster Blaster. I saw that it would be a small step to do a construction set. This was the kind of program I liked, since there was no game to write. But it was a lot of work, since I had to implement file saving, a mini sound editor and a mini paint program.'"

Comments

If only....

[278MorkandMindy]

... you could "bump" the side of your computer to make that "impossible" shot.

Quite an interesting study of physics, how a sharp bump can move the entire machine just enough to hit the ball, yet still foil the anti bump devices.

Blast from the past

[yotto]

I absolutely LOVED Pinball Construction Set when I was a kid. I had it on my Apple //c in probably '84 or '85 and I made so many pinball games on it.

I also loved Lode Runner for the same reason: User created levels. Too bad back then it was just me and one other friend doing the "sharing."

Good times. Good times.

Re:Blast from the past

[v1]

I too loved Lode Runner, I had all three (or were there more?) releases of it. The level editor was a ton of fun. We'd stay after school working on our levels, and testing them of course. The computer teacher forbid computer games in her lab during school, but man you have to TEST those levels you're programming y'know!

We also hacked the levels on the included discs to allow editing of course plus a lot more. That game had a simple but effective AI for the enemies. The only bug I remember is you could run halfway up a ladder and stop, and it would drive all of the opponents to the highest ground available. (until you moved)

I never got into PBCS but I do remember it.

I made a level that no one besides me could finish. It was full of traps of various types that all required a special trick of sort to solve. The final trick involved luring an opponent into picking up the last piece of gold, dropping him into a hole he could not get out of, and going to a specific place and making a hole with the right timing that he'd die of a cave-in. Picking up the last piece of gold usually caused a ladder to the top to appear, but it had the same effect if an enemy died of a cave-in that was carrying the last piece of gold. You could escape, but only if the hole was already made, but one ladder appeared OVER the hole you had to have dug in advance. (since you cannot dig under ladders) Since holes filled in shortly after being dug, you had to do all this with careful timing

Re:Blast from the past

[himurabattousai]

Even so, there's a certain feel that doesn't come easily (or at all) on the computer. A set of buttons can only go so far in recreating the whole experience of pinball. Still, Visual Pinball kicks stupendous amounts of ass, especially when you start building your own tables. If you built a proper VP cabinet, it just might be better than the real thing.

Play it online right now...

[waxcrash]

You can play it right now with this Apple II Java emulator... http://www.virtualapple.org/pinballconstructionsetdisk.html

Get VP9 + VPINMAME

[Joe The Dragon]

http://www.vpforums.org/

http://www.pinballnirvana.com/

For the record...

[hitchhacker]

.. and some karma whoring. Archive.org has a 1984 demo/interview with Budge on Computer Chronicles. A quick youtube search finds it here also. That guy from EA still creeps me out... as does the space shuttle guy.

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