| Session Name: | Classic Game Postmortem: Pinball Construction Set |
| Speaker(s): | Bill Budge |
| Company Name(s): | |
| Track / Format: | Design |
| Overview: | Before LittleBigPlanet and Trials Evolution allowed users a way to create and share levels online, players could trade personalized content via floppy disk. In 1983, Electronic Arts published Pinball Construction Set with an abstract cover to match an equally experimental game that was one of the first to engender user generated content. The game's editor allowed players to construct their own virtual pinball tables, and players could save these tables to disk and trade them with friends. The editor's clean and simple interface even served as inspiration to designs behind SimCity six years later. Construction Set eventually grew into a series, with music, adventure, and racing themes for sequels. Bill Budge, the father of the seminal Pinball entry, will lay out the blueprints for how he constructed his own game and one of the earliest examples of an in-game editor. |
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