Paperboy – “It’s a rough job, but…”

For the fourth time in fewer than 25 posts, I am writing about an Elite Systems conversion of an arcade game. Paperboy followed Commando, Bomb Jack and Ghosts’n Goblins to the top of the UK chart. In 1986, Elite had found a strong niche and they were working fast to make the most of it that they could. Usually that meant arcade games from Japan, starting from Capcom and working outwards. One of Elite’s biggest and longest-lasting successes, though, was a conversion of a game by Atari, with a visibly American suburban setting which turned out to translate very well to British audiences.

Dave Ralston, an artist at Atari, came up with the concept for Paperboy in 1983, and primarily worked on it with programmer John Salwitz. It took two years from the idea to release, partly a reflection of how much it was pushing the technology of the time. Ralston saw Sega’s 1982 arcade space shooter Zaxxon, and was impressed by how it looked three-dimensional, using an isometric view. He then took the idea of a vehicle moving through a space past various structures, and connected it to his experiences in younger days delivering newspapers. With that, the idea of Paperboy emerged.

Ralston and Salwitz had previously worked on prototypes of Akka Arrh, a shooter which Atari opted not to go ahead with (although it did eventually see release in a revised version by Jeff Minter in 2023). Paperboy would be the duo’s first released game. Ralston and Salwitz planned out a game where the challenge was to throw newspapers into subscribers’ letterboxes, and sketched out the houses and various obstacles that their paperboy on his bicycle would have to deal with. They ended up with three different streets available to select from, as a way of choosing difficulty level. Each street plays out over a full week, with little developments happening in the path each day.

Fitting everything into the memory available was as always a tough challenge, with Salwitz later telling Retro Gamer that “you were literally counting every byte you were putting into things. One thing that meant was that any ideas of having more than one player character had to go as the character used a lot of graphics memory. “As for the choice between whether it should have been a paperboy or a papergirl, you just kind of go with the thing that’s the most obvious, except of course for the giant snails and all those other things…”

Doug Snyder, Linda Sinkovic and Milt Loper worked on the arcade hardware for Paperboy. This hardware included a novel control approach, with handlebars in place of a joystick. Unrealistically, the speed could be controlled by leaning the bars forward and backward. There was also a button for throwing newspapers, be that at letterboxes of subscribers or at the windows of those who didn’t want your paper. The controller was based in part on the yoke one from Atari’s 1983 Star Wars game, which, with handlebars stuck on, acted as an initial prototype for Paperboy’s.

Paperboy is less three-dimensional than Zaxxon, which frequently had players diving and climbing to avoid missiles and fit through gaps. In Paperboy, only the bonus obstacle courses at the end of each day involve any real movement up and down. Instead the complexity is added through variations in speed, and trying to judge the timing of newspaper throws. There is initially no incentive to go at anything but a slow, careful speed, but it soon adds swarms of bees following you to force you to up to speed. Even without vertical platforming, its isometric view was well timed in the UK, where there was a trend of such games doing well, from Knight Lore to Batman.

At the arcades, Paperboy became a success in the US and more widely, although Computer & Video Games wrote that in the UK it still “didn’t really get the exposure it deserved in the arcades”, blaming the expense of the custom controller. In March 1986, Namco, which was now the majority owner of the separated out arcade bit of Atari, showed off Paperboy and Marble Madness at a Namco-only Japanese trade show. Come that October, Namco also took Paperboy to the Amusement Machine Show in Tokyo. There, Steve Wilcox from British publisher Elite Systems was in attendance looking for arcade games that Elite might take on to follow up their forthcoming conversion of Capcom’s Commando. At different points Wilcox has recounted signing a deal for Paperboy at the show, or at Atari’s offices in California.

Either way, Elite set about putting together teams to make versions of Paperboy for various home computer formats. The Amstrad CPC version had graphics by Paul Walker, who would go on to work on everything from Mike Read’s Computer Pop Quiz to Wipeout 3, and was programmed by Mike Haigh-Hutchinson, who would later work on many LucasArts Star Wars games before becoming a senior engineer on Metroid Prime. The Commodore 64 version brought together Christian Harvey, who had programmed the C64 Bomb Jack, and Neil Bate, who had worked on early Elite platformer Kokotoni Wilf, plus Mark Cooksey on music. Looking to reach as many players as possible, Elite commissioned a BBC Micro version too, by Andy Williams. He had also previously worked on Kokotoni Wilf, in his case the Spectrum version.

For Paperboy on the Spectrum, Steve Wilcox identified some new talent to bring on board. As he told Retro Gamer in 2014, Elite would “scour the magazines for highly regarded ‘original’ games and track down the coders/artists behind them” to invite to “work with us on the conversion of higher profile games”. They identified Steve Lamb and Tony Mack this way after they had worked on “a knock-off of Marble Madness for Melbourne House”. That would be Gyroscope, a UK #11 hit in December 1985. Since Marble Madness was another isometric Atari game, it’s pretty easy to see the logic there. Steve Lamb would actually go on to work on an official Marble Madness conversion too, the 1992 version for Sega’s Master System and Game Gear.

Steve Lamb told Sinclair User around Paperboy’s release that he had been surprised to be given a game so well-known to make right away. He was only given a couple of “very poor” photos to work with, so he mostly sketched out its graphics over a series of visits to his local arcade. “Sometimes it was quite embarrassing because mostly the plans were noted down looking over someone else’s shoulder while they were playing”. The first, and most important, thing he then figured out was the scrolling. 

“The program had to handle diagonal scrolling, smoothly and at various speeds, which was obviously going to present a problem on the Spectrum. The way I did it was to set aside an area in memory to store the screen backgrounds — the houses, gardens and so on. This area is then scrolled before being moved onto the screen”. He was pleased with the results of their work. “I think the end result turned out to be about as good a compromise as you’re going to get” between the original and the limitations of the Spectrum. 

The compromises included making the playing area of the screen almost entirely monochrome. Andy Williams took the same decision for the BBC version, while the Commodore 64 version was multi-coloured in its own slightly muted way. The Amstrad version looked the most like the arcade game in its colourful appearance, with its compromise instead being that it had no sound whatsoever.

As American as the game’s setting was, its concept was easy-to-grasp and relatable, with lots of British reviewers mentioning their own experiences of newspaper delivery rounds. The style of comic presentation certainly transferred easily enough, with some of the arcade game’s scenes feeling like they could fit in the Beano. In one bit of localisation which happened across just about every version and as such was presumably an Elite idea from above, cars and trikes pulling out of driveways were replaced by a Sinclair C5. Clive Sinclair’s flop electric vehicle would continue to endure as an object of fun in games for a while yet.

Meanwhile, the fact that the newspaper you deliver in Paperboy is called The Daily Sun had rather different cultural implications in the UK. Zzap! 64 and Mike Pattenden in Commodore User each picked up on that in suspiciously identical language, with both emphasising that the paper was not Britain’s own “soaraway, topless, fascist” tabloid. Computer & Video Games described the game as “so simple to learn that even a Sun reader can cope with it”.

The Spectrum version of the game got mostly positive reviews. C&VG called it “extremely playable, very addictive and incredibly easy to get into”. “The trick sideways scroll has been well executed” wrote Popular Computing Weekly, while Your Sinclair called the same scroll as “just dippy, giving you enough warning to manoeuvre your way past the hazards.” Sinclair User’s Graham Taylor ventured that “I don’t think those who buy this on the strength of the original will feel cheated”. About the worst review it got was Crash’s, which referred to its “boring old blue ‘n’ black-o-vision” and said that “I’m sure that anyone buying Paperboy will play it for hours — but come away with the feeling ‘not much to that!’”

Sister publication Zzap! 64 was significantly harsher on the Commodore 64 version. Gary Penn called it “a waste of time, effort and money”, while Julian Rignall set out the case against the original and Commodore 64 version alike: “Take an arcade game which relies heavily on its brilliant sound, speech and graphics to enhance its rather boring gameplay. Then remove them. What are you left with?” Commodore User was much more forgiving, calling it “an original idea and a well-executed conversion”, in which “the scrolling is great and the gameplay tenacious”. 

Computer & Video Games’s reviewer picked up on a different issue with the C64 one, writing that “I’ve played the Spectrum version as well, and completed it within a few days, but I’ve been at the Commodore version for over a week now and I can’t seem to get past Thursday”. That certainly resonates with my experience, with the C64 feeling much heavier on learning by rote rather than being able to react in the same way as the arcade game. Overall the contrast lands somewhere near to Elite’s earlier Bomb Jack, where the more graphically limited Spectrum version also managed to retain more of the feeling of the arcade game. When pressed by Retro Gamer, Steve Wilcox said that he would most like to have revised the C64 version, while the Spectrum one was his favourite. 

Paperboy went to the top of the UK charts for four weeks on release and then a further week in November. It wound up just behind Ghosts’n Goblins as the UK’s seventh bestselling game of 1986, despite not releasing until September. It returned to the top of the charts for several weeks more in July 1987, when sales took off for additional versions on the Commodore 16 (a necessarily barebones take written by Jörg Dierks) and the Electron, Acorn’s budget alternative to the BBC Micro. The Electron version was pretty much the same Andy Williams version, which Sam Greenhill in Acorn User called “the computer version of the arcade hit, but not a very good one”.

The success of Paperboy didn’t stop there. Towards the end of 1989, Elite rereleased it on their budget label Encore. Sinclair User reckoned that “diagonally scrolling games have had their day” and Your Sinclair marvelled that “it’s so old that on initial release there was even an Electron version”, but its unusual concept and simplicity still proved enduringly popular. In a budget-software-dominated time, it spent six weeks at the top of the UK chart between November 1989 and February 1990. 

Mindscape capitalised on its lasting appeal the following year by releasing a sequel, Paperboy 2, with innovations including, at last, the chance to play as a papergirl instead. That reached #17 in the UK chart in January 1992. In 2006, when Rockstar released Canis Canem Edit (aka Bully) and had to think of a range of activities for a schoolboy in America, one of the minigames they included involved riding a bicycle and delivering newspapers by throwing them. 

Back in the more immediate period after Paperboy’s release, Elite Systems were presented with the award for Software House of the Year by Jools Holland at Computer & Video Games’s Golden Joystick awards. Wilcox later reported that their revenue for 1986 was more than £3 million, double the previous year. They were the year’s biggest British software success. The thing was, though, it had pretty much all been achieved with conversions of arcade games they had signed up back at the end of 1985.

Elite had been ambitious enough to outbid Ocean for Commando, and perceptive enough to head over to Tokyo before they’d even finished Commando and get the drop on numerous competitors. A year later, their success had now shown everyone else the way to go, including some very well-resourced rivals. Tim Chaney of Ocean-linked publisher U.S. Gold later described his company’s reaction to Elite’s success with Commando: “What the fuck! These guys on top of a fish and chip shop in Walsall got Commando, got the number one so… let’s go after coin-ops.” U.S. Gold then paid Capcom £750,000 for a ten-game deal, “just to make sure it didn’t happen again, that there was no way Elite could ever get their hands on a Capcom game again.”

There would be no question of Elite picking up any more popular arcade games on the cheap at 1986’s Amusement Machine Show. Elite decided to pivot to making more of their own original games. It did not go very well. Still, with games like Paperboy selling so well for so long, they were able to keep going, and keep trying different things. It would take a long, long time, for them to reach the top of the chart again, but Paperboy would not be their final UK #1.

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Sources:

• Are you Elite?, Martyn Carroll, Retro Gamer No. 13, May 2005
• The Making of Paperboy, Darran Jones, Retro Gamer No. 39, June 2007
• From the Archives: Elite Systems, David Crookes, Retro Gamer No. 65, June 2009 
• The Ultimate Guide to Paperboy, Retro Gamer No. 125, February 2014
• John Salwitz on the making of Atari’s Paperboy, Daniel New, Thumbsticks, 2019
• Game 383: Paperboy, Ahab, Data Driven Gamer, 2023
• Ghosts’n Goblins, Computer & Video Games No. 56, June 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Background Noise: Paperboy, Sinclair User No. 56, November 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• A History of AT Games / Atari Games / Midway Games West – 1985, Michael Current, 2014/2026
• Many Videos Unveiled But Visitors Decreased, Game Machine No. 271, November 1985, accessed via Onitama.tv
• Paperboy, Paperboy 2, Gyroscope, chart histories at Computer Hits
• Zzap! Test – Paperboy, Zzap! 64 No. 22, February 1987, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
• Screen Scene – Paperboy, Mike Pattenden, Commodore User No. 39, December 1986, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack
• Software reviews – Paperboy, Computer & Video Games No. 60, October 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• C&VG Reviews – Paperboy, Computer & Video Games No. 64, February 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Read all about it!, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 5 No. 35, 28 August – 3 September 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Screen Shots – Paperboy, Rachael Smith, Your Sinclair No. 11, November 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Arcade review – Paperboy, Graham Taylor, Sinclair User No. 55, October 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Reviews – Paper Boy, Crash No. 33, October 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Sack the Paperboy, Sam Greenhill, Acorn User No. 63, October 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Games review – Paperboy, Garth Sumpter, Sinclair User No. 92, November 1989, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Bargain Basement – Paperboy, Marcus Berkmann, Your Sinclair No. 48, December 1989, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Yie Ar tops charts for 1986, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 6 No. 7, 12-18 February 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Golden Joystick Awards, Computer & Video Games No. 66, April 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• The Story of U.S. Gold, Chris Wilkins & Roger M. Kean, Fusion Retro Books, 2015

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