Bill Budge (born August 11, 1954[1]) is a retired American video game programmer and designer.

[1] Budge's first game was a Pong clone, called Penny Arcade, which he wrote using his own custom graphics routines.

He realized he could do what the big distributors were doing: putting the games in packaging— Ziploc bags—and delivering them to software stores.

Budge and his sister, who also handled the accounting, would assemble the game packages in one of the rooms of his house and deliver them to local software stores.

The project required him to write a mini-paint program, a mini sound editor and save/load systems.

When he was approached by Electronic Arts (EA) founder Trip Hawkins (whom he had met when they both worked at Apple) to publish his games, he discussed the idea with Steve Wozniak[citation needed] and signed on.

[8] BYTE's reviewer stated in December 1984 that he made far fewer errors when using an Apple Mouse with MousePaint than with a KoalaPad and its software.

He found that MousePaint was easier to use and more efficient, and predicted that the mouse would receive more software support than the pad.

[11][12] Budge and his wife live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have two children, Natalie and Andrew.

In 2008, Pinball Construction Set was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for "User Generated Content/Game Modification".

[13] On February 10, 2011, Budge was the second recipient of the Pioneer Award from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.