We’ve seen plenty of games look at emulating particular aspects of real life. Usually they’re military or professional sports aspects, relatable to a relatively small number of people. Paperboy is something a little different: a game that’s based on a more mundane part of life that reimagines it as a computer game. What if your delivery job operated on arcade rules?
Paperboy is another arcade conversion, this time from an American Atari original. It’s a game about physical newspapers (remember those?) where you have a job delivering those papers to people’s houses. You control your paperboy riding their bike along an isometric view of a street and chuck newspapers at mailboxes. The setting is highly recognisable, both because suburbia doesn’t look that different anywhere and because so many American films set in this precise vision of picket fences and bird tables have made it here.
However, the execution of the basic concept is endearingly game-y. Riding along the street and timing the throwing of newspapers to get them in the mailboxes gives a decent initial challenge. But that doesn’t give you a full fun game experience, and so the portrayal gets warped to what does. Your average suburban street is also not all that busy, but that won’t do, and so you get something happening – tyres rolling, suitcases sitting abandoned, someone pulling out of their driveway in what is probably not a Sinclair C5 – at every moment. You don’t get given a bag full of all the newspapers you need, but pick up a new set at each street corner.
You’re also encouraged to make use of the spare papers by throwing them at the houses of non-subscribers to your employer and smashing some windows. Leaving aside the value of this activity as a business practice, while I’ve seen some oversized magazine supplements in my time that kind of breakage power is a bit unlikely. Who cares, though, it’s more fun! If there’s any attempt at commentary on newspapers or their readers, it has to get in line behind what works for gameplay. This is a theme that we will inevitably be returning to all the way through this project.
In the case of Paperboy and its British audience, the game impulses have the very useful secondary effect of essentially turning the street into something from a comic in the Beano. The model of irreverent anarchy is almost as instantly recognisable as the real life underpinning. Perhaps that’s why Paperboy went on to be such a success that in addition to reaching the top of the chart in 1986, it returned there in budget form as late as 1990. Maybe there was something in game versions of everyday life.
