Raster Blaster
Bill Budge's Raster Blaster (or Rasterblaster on the disk label) is a pioneering home computer pinball simulation written by Bill Budge for the Apple II and published in 1981 by Budge's company, BudgeCo. It was ported to the Atari 8-bit family. "Raster Blaster" resembles the Williams "Firepower" table from 1980. While not the first pinball game for home computers, "Raster Blaster" set a higher bar for visual fidelity, and the next several years saw a flurry of Apple II pinball titles: "David's Midnight Magic" (1982), "Night Mission Pinball" (1982), and Budge's own "Pinball  Construction Set" (1983). Reception. Debuting in April 1981, the game sold 25,000 copies by June 1982, tied for fourth on "Computer Gaming World"s list of top sellers. "BYTE" praised the game's realistic physics, writing that "Most microcomputer games that are versions of existing board or equipment games aren't worth the disks they're printed on, but "Raster Blaster" does not fall into that category!" "Raster Blaster" was voted "Softalk" magazine's Most Popular Program of 1981. "Softline" stated when reviewing "David's Midnight Magic" that it "ratifies Bill Budge's extraordinary program as a programming tour de force  and proof of Budge's technical lead over his rivals", as "Midnight" was merely equal to "Raster Blaster" despite being nine months ("an eternity in the Apple II world") newer. "Compute!" called the Atari version "addictive", although it noted some bugs.