Who wrote pinball wizard movie#
Who wrote pinball wizard software#

At last friend and fellow graduate student Andy Hertzfeld convinced him to go with the local product of nearby Apple Computer. Budge dithered for a time about whether to buy one, and if so which one. He was still working on that in late 1978 when the Apple II first entered his life.Īs you might expect, the arrival of the trinity of 1977 had prompted considerable discussion within Berkeley’s computer-science department. He got his Bachelor’s there, then stayed on to study for a PhD.

After two years he transferred to Berkeley as a computer-science major. Yet in the end the pull of programming proved too strong. He entered the University of California Santa Cruz as an English major, with vague aspirations toward becoming a novelist. Without the ready access to computers that his high school had afforded him, Budge tried to put his programming behind him. Budge spent hours writing computer versions of Tic-tac-toe, checkers, and Go.īut then high school was over. Hungate was eventually able to finagle a deal with another local business to get a terminal installed at the school with a connection to an HP 2100 machine hosting HP Time-Shared BASIC. He “just programmed all the time” during his last two years of high school. He calls the moment he discovered what a loop is one of the “transcendent moments” in his life. It was a primitive way of working, but Budge was immediately smitten.

They then got to learn whether their programs had worked from a printout sent back to the school. The students wrote their programs out by hand, then sent them off to a local company that had agreed to donate some time on their IBM 1401 minicomputer. A teacher at his school named Harriet Hungate started a class in “computer math” soon after Budge arrived. With the heart of the burgeoning Silicon Valley easily accessible, Budge’s family had found the perfect spot for a boy who liked to tinker with technology. (“It’s amazing we didn’t kill ourselves.”) After moving about the country constantly when Budge was younger, his family finally ended up in the San Francisco Bay area by the time Budge began high school in the late 1960s. As an older kid, he moved on to fiddling with telescopes and model rockets. As a young kid, he played with blocks, tinker toys, erector sets. Having arrived at the time of the birth of Electronic Arts and Budge’s masterpiece, Pinball Construction Set, now seems a good moment to take a step back and look at what made Budge such a star.īudge was always a tinkerer, always fascinated by the idea of construction sets. As you may remember, his name carried such weight that when Richard Garriott was first contacted by Al Remmers of California Pacific to propose that he allow CP to publish Akalabeth Garriott’s first reaction was a sort of “I’m not worthy” sense of shock at the prospect of sharing a publisher with the great Budge. Mentioning him has been almost unavoidable, for he was one of the titans amongst early Apple II programmers, worshiped for his graphical wizardry by virtually everyone who played games. The name of Bill Budge has already come up from time to time on this blog.

Who wrote pinball wizard software#

It was not released as a commercial single in the United States and was not allowed to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 countdown.Bill Budge in Electronic Arts software artist pose It went to number 7 in the United Kingdom, number 88 in Australia and number 13 in Ireland.

Who wrote pinball wizard movie#

In 1975, singer Elton John covered Pinball Wizard for the 1975 Ken Russell movie Tommy.

' Grow Some Funk of Your Own / I Feel Like a Bullet (In the Gun of Robert Ford)' It went to number 4 in the United Kingdom, number 19 in the United States, number 14 in Ireland, number 12 in the Netherlands, number 6 in Canada and South Africa and number 8 in New Zealand.Įlton John version 'Pinball Wizard' ' Pinball Wizard' is a 1969 song by English rock band The Who and featured on the rock opera Tommy.