Most arcade games of 1985 asked you to shoot aliens or jump between platforms. Paperboy asked you to do a paper round. You rode a BMX down a suburban street seen from above and to one side, throwing copies of the Daily Sun at the doors and mailboxes of the people who paid for it and through the windows of the people who did not, while cars, dogs, breakdancers and the Grim Reaper tried to knock you off your bike. You steered with a pair of chrome handlebars bolted to the front of the cabinet. The idea came, its designer said, from a family of five brothers who had all been paperboys.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Atari Games.
- Designers: Dave Ralston (designer and lead artist, with Will Noble) and John Salwitz (lead programmer).
- Arcade release: early 1985; the game carries a 1984 copyright date.
- Controls: handlebars that turn to steer and push forward or pull back to speed up or brake, with buttons to throw papers.
- Home versions: Elite Systems on the ZX Spectrum (1986) and Commodore 64 (by early 1987), then the Amiga (1989), among others; Mindscape on the NES (1988) and Game Boy; U.S. Gold on the Master System; versions for the Atari Lynx and Mega Drive.
A week of deliveries
The game lasts a week, Monday to Sunday. Before each day the player sees which houses on the street take the paper. Subscribers’ houses are bright, with a welcome mat marked “SUN”; the others are dark, with rude messages on their doormats, Computer Gamer reported when it reviewed the coin-op in August 1985. A paper landing on a subscriber’s step or in their mailbox scores points. A missed delivery or a broken window costs a customer, who cancels, and a perfect round wins one back. Non-subscribers are fair game: points for their windows, their doors and the statues in their gardens. Papers run out, and the player has to ride over bundles lying on the pavement to restock.
The street fights back. Cars and motorcycles cross the junctions, dogs chase the bike, and there are remote-controlled cars, skateboarders, breakdancers, workmen digging up the road, lawnmowers that seem to drive themselves and, as the week goes on, stranger things, the Grim Reaper among them. Hitting any of them costs a life. At the end of the street comes a training course like a BMX track, with ramps to jump and targets to hit, and then the Daily Sun’s front page reports on how the day went. The player picks one of three streets at the start: Easy Street, Middle Road or Hard Way, the last and hardest.
Two years, a keg and a focus group
The team took two years over it. According to Ralston, Paperboy came together on the morning after one of Atari’s Beer Fridays, when he and Salwitz dragged the leftover keg into an atrium to brainstorm. Ralston had storyboards showing the whole street in projection, and that day they placed perhaps “60–70 percent” of the characters that ended up in the game. The view came from Zaxxon: “We saw it and realised that the isometric perspective would offer a very good view of the action in our game and that it would work far better than a side scroller or a top-down.” The subject came from home. “There were five boys in my family and I was the last one and we were all paperboys,” Ralston told Retro Gamer. “I think I was a really good paperboy.”
The first street was stranger than the one that shipped. “We had things like speedboats going down the middle of the street, runaway pianos, giant snails at the various junctions and even ducks in business suits that would walk up and down the sidewalk,” Ralston said. Focus groups “just didn’t get it”. One was so bad that the team was heartbroken, until Don Traeger, the marketing man who ran it, came out smiling and said they had learned a lot. Traeger also provided the paperboy’s voice. Atari tested games by leaving a prototype in a local arcade and counting the coins, and the team pinned a fake earnings report on Traeger’s desk while he was on holiday, showing that the game had “tanked”, with “Project Cancelled” written across it. In fact it tested well.
Memory set limits. There is no papergirl because, Salwitz explained, the one central character already took “an enormous amount of memory”, and they were “literally counting every byte”. Nor could the team make a throwing animation work; in the end, Ralston said, the paperboy “shoots them out of his head”.
The handlebars
The first version used a joystick, and players found it confusing with the angled view. Instead the team took the flight yoke from Atari’s Star Wars cabinet and had it reworked by Milt Loper of Atari’s mechanical shop into handlebars. Atari’s controls had to pass the “Stubben rule”: if Dave Stubben, a large, strong executive, could not break it, it would survive the public. An early prototype failed a smaller tester. Salwitz remembered Mark Cerny giving it “a massive twist” and it “practically came off in his hands”.
Home versions
Elite Systems held the home computer licence, and its adverts carried the line “Paperboy 1984 Atari Games, Inc.” Steve Lamb converted it to the Spectrum from sketches made in the arcade. “Quite often they wondered what I was doing,” he told Sinclair User, because the plans were drawn looking over players’ shoulders. Fitting in the detail took a lot of compression, and the road alone came to about 14K. CRASH gave it 88% in October 1986, praising its addictiveness while regretting its “boring old blue ‘n’ black-o-vision” colours, and in December it went straight to number one in Sinclair User’s Spectrum chart.
The other versions were received less warmly:
| Version | Period review |
|---|---|
| Commodore 64 (Elite) | ZZAP!64, February 1987: 44%, with 48% for graphics and 40% for lastability. |
| Amiga (Elite, £19.99) | Amiga Format, November 1989: 41%, “an essentially mediocre product”. |
| NES (Mindscape) | Mean Machines, March 1991: “a sadly derisive conversion of a classic coin-op”, with the three skill levels missing. |
| Master System (U.S. Gold, £29.99) | 85% in Mean Machines issue 1, “as close a conversion as any Sega owner could hope for”. |
| Game Boy (Mindscape) | ACE, October 1990: easier to play than the coin-op, and the windows do not visibly break. |
| Mega Drive (£34.99) | Mean Machines, February 1992: “a potentially superb coin-op conversion” let down by the collision detection and the steering. |
Later life
Mindscape published a sequel, Paperboy 2, and a new Paperboy followed on the Nintendo 64; Retro Gamer thought little of either. Digital Eclipse converted the arcade game for Xbox Live Arcade in 2007. Elite, which had kept a licence from Atari Games’ successor, Midway Games West, sold Paperboy for mobile phones in the 2000s. When Midway went bankrupt in 2009, the Atari Games catalogue, Paperboy with it, went to Warner Bros.
Sources
- Electronic Games vol. 3 no. 3, March 1985, p. 81: Paperboy among Atari’s new coin-ops, with “a pair of handlebar controllers”.
- Computer Gamer issue 5, August 1985, pp. 18–19: arcade review, the Daily Sun, “SUN” doormats and rude messages, obstacles, the training course, cancellations and the handlebars.
- Retro Gamer issue 39, 2007, Darran Jones, “The Making of: Paperboy”, pp. 28–33: Ralston and Salwitz’s roles, Will Noble, Beer Friday, the storyboards, Zaxxon, the five brothers, two years’ work, seven days, Easy Street and Hard Way, focus groups and Don Traeger, the fake earnings report, Traeger’s voice, the joystick, the Star Wars controller and Milt Loper, the Stubben rule and Mark Cerny, the cut characters, no papergirl, the throwing animation, Paperboy 2 and the N64 version, the Xbox Live Arcade version by Digital Eclipse.
- Amazing Computing vol. 4 no. 12, December 1989, p. 49: Amiga review, Easy Street, Middle Road and Hard Way.
- Nintendo Power issue 3, November–December 1988, p. 74: the NES version from Mindscape and its obstacles.
- CRASH issue 33, October 1986, p. 18: Spectrum review, Elite, £7.95, 88%.
- CRASH issue 50, March 1988, p. 27: Elite’s Best of Elite advertisement, “Paperboy 1984 Atari Games, Inc.”
- Sinclair User issue 56, November 1986, pp. 98–99, “Background Noise”: Steve Lamb on converting Paperboy.
- Sinclair User issue 57, December 1986, p. 12: Spectrum chart, Paperboy new at number one.
- ZZAP!64 issue 22, February 1987, pp. 106–107: C64 review, Elite, £9.95 cassette, 44%.
- Amiga Format issue 4, November 1989, p. 46: Amiga review, Elite, £19.99, 41%.
- ACE issue 37, October 1990, p. 86: Game Boy version from Mindscape.
- Mean Machines issue 6, March 1991, pp. 44–45: NES review; the Master System version from U.S. Gold, £29.99, 85% in issue 1.
- Mean Machines issue 17, February 1992, pp. 100–102: Mega Drive review, £34.99; “the original Atari coin-op appeared in early 1985”.
- The Atari Games and Elite Systems entries, and the sources they cite: the Lynx version, Elite’s licence from Midway Games West, and the Warner Bros. sale.