Success Quote by Bill Budge

There’s a quietly radical pragmatism in Budge’s line: platform loyalty doesn’t matter; distribution does. The sentence is dressed up as a technical necessity (“I have to program it for the Apple”), but the real engine is market logic (“because I want to get all of the markets”). That pivot reveals the early personal-computing era as a messy land grab, when the act of choosing a machine was also choosing who got to play.

The intent is plainspoken and strategic. Budge isn’t romanticizing the Apple as a creative instrument; he’s treating it as a key that opens doors. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Apple II systems became a dominant home/school platform, especially in the U.S., with a fast-growing retail ecosystem. If you wanted reach, you didn’t start with the “best” computer. You started with the one already sitting on desks.

The subtext is about leverage and gatekeeping. “Program it for the Apple” implies that other versions can follow, but the first move sets your economic trajectory: which stores will stock you, which reviewers will notice, which users will evangelize your game. It’s also an early snapshot of a pattern that keeps repeating in tech culture: creators publicly frame choices as craft, while privately optimizing for access, compatibility, and momentum.

Budge’s bluntness is the tell. He’s saying the quiet part out loud: in games, the marketplace is part of the design.