BudgeCo

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". Budge marketed his games commercially with a floppy disk drive salesman who traveled from store to store; he and the salesman agreed to split profits of selling his games 50/50. Budge was shocked when he got his first check for USD$7,000.

Budge does not enjoy playing video games, and described having to play pinball for months while developing Pinball Construction Set as "sheer torture." He more enjoyed writing fast graphics libraries for game programmers. Budge said "I wasn't that interested in playing or designing games. My real love was in writing fast graphics code. It occurred to me that creating tools for others to make games was a way for me to indulge my interest in programming without having to make games." and "The way I got started was by not trying to do anything original at all. I wanted to learn how to write videogames. I... just went to arcades and copied the games that I saw."