Pinball Construction Set created a new genre of video games - the "builder" or "construction set" class of games.

Users can construct their own virtual pinball machine, by dropping controls onto a table. Controls included bumpers, flippers, spinners and other standard pinball paraphernalia. Attributes such as gravity and the physics model could also be modified.

Users could then save their creations and develop custom artwork to go along with them. As Pinball Construction Set itself was not needed to play the tables, they could be freely traded online or on a floppy disk.