Forum Overview :: Article Submissions :: 90. Paperboy (1985, Arcade)

[quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]90. Paperboy Creator: Atari Genre: Action / "Arcade" Year: 1985 Platforms: Arcade and 19 other systems. <a href="https://www.mobygames.com/game/4577/paperboy/">Mobygames link</a> Available through: MAME, Xbox 360 I have the arcade cabinet for this, I've had it since October of 2025 and part of this is because it's awesome but also, almost more than any other arcade game, it continually provides surprises. It is approachable: everyone who has been in my garage has tried it and hey, we all know how to ride a bike. The music is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qIRY-gcpKM">catchy</a>. The humor is just as cynical as it needs to be, but no more cynical than that - when you start the game, you get speech synthesis(!) giving you one of maybe 5 phrases, one of which is, "You may not like the news, but you have to respect the person that delivers it." It's 41 years later and yeah, I'll agree with that. You could say that here without generating a 10 page thread afterwards. The bicycle handlebars for the controls are not exactly a gimmick. They are nice, but I've been able to play it and do well on MAME with a gamepad/keyboard and the 360 with its gamepad. The handlebars are better and contribute to it being a hall of fame kind of game. (There is a story about how fragile the handlebars were at first - Mark Cerny, of Marble Madness and, er, Sony Playstation fame originally ripped the handlebars off the cabinet and did not paint himself as a particularly strong and brutal man. They did have another person do the same for the second rev, whose name I can't find.) But why I specifically think this game is a top 100 game is because of the <b>chaos</b> and <b>surprises</b>. You have to deliver newspapers to keep the game going and have some happy subscribers, but otherwise they are your weapons. I'm gonna be honest and state that watching a little kid realize he can destroy anything on the screen by chucking papers at it is one of the most rewarding moments of my life and went a long way toward including it here because everyone who plays this will probably have this revelation, it's just that some of us had it 4 decades ago. But there is also the surprises. For most of my life I stuck with the easiest road ("Easy Street") but since owning it I have seen people pick Middle Road and Hard Way (the two cleverly-named other difficulty settings) and things are constantly coming out of the screen, behind the houses for literal surprises. There's more "stuff" happening on those other levels, more creatures and monsters and enemies running around suburbia. In some ways, it a cautionary tale, propaganda for those three streets needing to be part of an HOA. But even on the easiest path: - You can break up a fist fight, you can knock them both down or one of the fighters. Maybe the first time any video game let you stop a fight. - You can defeat a burglar trying to get into a home by hitting him with a paper OR just break the window, letting him get inside - You can knock down gravestones, smash a werewolf, damage houses, etc. This was all done, I assume, in Assembly and more than any other game I remember from 1985 it makes you think they thought of EVERYTHING. This is kind of what I want and like in games. I am a big fan of "no way did they think of that... they thought of that!" moments. <a href="https://github.com/robbsherwin/paperboy-pcjr">I fixed the DOS version so it works correctly in 16 colors on a PCjr</a> along with music. Though the music is not the arcade music for the DOS version and therefore it sucks. I was not the only person who has ever fixed graphics for PCjr, but I am the last person to have fixed it, I think. (I should try to change the music so it plays the actual theme.) Do not feel the need to play the DOS version, it sucks. I am happy it exists, but it is not a good version. The Amiga and Atari Lynx versions I have played. The Amiga version looks closest to the real thing although the music is not good and the Lynx version plays surprisingly well. <img src="https://www.caltrops.com/images/top100/paperboy01.jpg" width=800>[/quote]