Paperboy - it's delivery madness!

Posted by: Paul Smith

Since medieval times, children riding mountain bikes around housing estates have been the traditional English method of buying drugs, guns, and litters of dangerous dogs.   Happily, across the Atlantic, things are very different.   In America, children are healthy, hearty, cheerful, and consider a lithe physique and an excellent well rounded education to be the foundation stones of a happy, productive society.    It for this reason that Paperboy, released by Atari in 1984, finds the titular hero delivering Scientific American around Southern California rather than dumping Inside TV in a canal in Leeds. 
Paperboy is a very novel game.   For a start, the player views the action via cabinet projection.   If you know your perspectives, you'll know that this differs from the more usually seen cavalier projection in that the length of the receding lines is halved.  Ambitiously, Atari designed the game to be played via a controller fashioned into the shape of a set of handlebars.  Slightly crazily, the paperboy needs to be in constant motion to avoid swarms of bees appearing from nowhere and killing him.  Newspapers are delivered by hurling them at the houses of subscribers, which are highlighted on a street map shown at the beginning of each stage.   If you fancy it, you can vandalise non-subscriber houses for extra points.    This somewhat passive-aggressive method of attracting new business seems to work, however, as there are more and more newspapers to deliver as the stages progress.   The player is able to choose the difficulty level of each stage - Easy Street, Middle Road and Hard Way - and aims to deliver papers flawlessly for an entire week. 

Tribulations come in many forms for the gallant youth.  He'll lose a life if any of the following things happen: the aforementioned lapses in pedalling, hitting a drain, hitting a fire hydrant, running into a breakdancer (well, this is 1984), getting caught up in a tornado, being mauled by a giant house cat, being attacked by early morning drunks, or, most prosiacly of all, being touched by the Grim Reaper.   Delivering newpapers inaccurately (hurling one through the living room window by accident, for example) will result in loss of subscribers, although the Grim Reaper and wandering drunks can be clobbered with a skilfully hurled periodical for bonus points.   It's not a simple matter of charging around the neighbourhood, either.   As the paperboy can only carry a set number of newspapers - ten - additional bundles are located around the neighbourhood, usually in tricky parts of the map. 

The training course, which occurs at the end of each stage and sees the player hurtling around the map performing simple tricks and jumps for various bonuses, is a slightly awkward part of the game.  While this did not detract from play, it added nothing either, and was later revealed to be merely an early version of the game which was bolted onto the finished version because there seemed no other way of introducing bonuses into regular gameplay.

Snippets of Paperboy cropped up regularly in popular culture for the next decade or so, most notably in an episode of something called Captain N: Games Master, which saw the central character renamed Julio and delivering newspapers to raise money for the family coffers, blighted after his father lost his job.   It also featured in the likeable early '90s British geekfest coincidentally also called Games Master, which featured the disembodied head of astronomer and lovely old buffer Patrick Moore dispensing gaming advice to 13 year olds.  

So that's Paperboy, a curiously cool game which created and then filled a niche so perfectly that it was never widely copied.  Get your cycle clips on and download a copy now.
 

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