Paperboy (video game)
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Template:Infobox Arcade Game Paperboy is a 1984 arcade game by Atari Games. The players take the role of a paperboy who delivers newspapers along a suburban street on his bicycle. This game was innovative for its theme and novel controls.
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Overview
The player controls a paperboy on a bicycle delivering newspapers along a suburban street. From the semi-isometric view, the player attempts to deliver a week of daily newspapers to subscribing customers, attempts to vandalize non-subscriber's homes and must avoid hazards along the street. Subscribers are lost by missing a delivery or damaging the subscriber's house, and can be recovered after a perfect day's delivery.
Description
The game begins with a choice of difficulty levels: Easy Street (easy), Middle Road (medium) and Hard Way (hard). The object of the game is to perfectly deliver papers to subscribers for an entire week and to avoid dying (using up all allotted lives) before the week ends. The game lasts for an entire week, Monday through Sunday.
Controlling the paperboy with the handlebar controls, the player attempts to deliver newspapers to subscribers. Each day begins by showing an overview of the street indicating subscribers and non-subscribers. Subscribers and non-subscribers' homes are also easy to discern in the level itself.
Delivering the Papers
The paperboy begins his route at the start of the street (bottom of the screen) and progresses towards the end. The player can control the paperboy's speed: faster delivery earns a higher score. But the paperboy is in constant movement and cannot stop moving forward until the level (day of the week) has ended.
Image:PaperboyGameplay.png The primary objectives of the game are to keep as many subscribers as possible and to stay alive. Secondary objectives include vandalizing non-subscribers' homes and hitting nuisances with newspapers.
Keeping subscribers is fairly straightforward: the player must deliver a paper to them. While the player may deliver more than one paper to each customer, they have to avoid accidentally damaging their homes, such as by throwing a paper through a closed window. Delivering a newspaper directly into the customer's newspaper box (or mailbox, as the voiceover calls it) earns bonus points. Accidentally damaging a customer's home or failing to deliver a paper causes the customer to cancel their subscription, and may cause the house to set traps for the paperboy the next day.
The player must stay alive by avoiding obstacles that appear along the street. Some obstacles include everyday nuiscances such as fire hydrants, storm drains, break dancers, cars, skateboarders and kids playing with radio controlled toys, to rather bizarre foes such as a tornado, oversized house cats and even the Grim Reaper himself. The player must also cross street intersections successfully (which gets harder each day). Some obstacles can earn the player bonus points. For example, the breakdancer and some men brawling in the street can be "smacked" with a newspaper for extra points. Hitting any of the obstacles with the bike results in the loss of a life.
Along the way, the paperboy can pick up extra bundles of papers, since he can only carry a limited number. These are usually located in difficult-to-reach spots.
Training Course
Image:PaperboyHazards.png The end of each level contains a "training course" which the player can traverse within an alotted time for bonus points. In the training course are various targets (to be struck with papers), jumps, water and other hazards, etc. Riding over a jump replenishes the paperboy's stock of papers in addition to earning points. As with the rest of the level, the difficulty of the training course increases over the week, with new hazards added each day. Crashing on the course or running out of time ends the day, but does not result in the loss of a life. Successful completion of the training course rewards the player with a bonus for any remaining time. Some versions of the arcade Paperboy included a now well-known bug in the training course: if the player exited the course just outside the intended finish area, the course would play again with various forms of sprite corruption. Completing this second course yielded a vast unintended score bonus.
Recapping the Delivery
The next day begins with the neigborhood overview again, highlighting new subscribers and any un-subscribers. A flawless delivery record for the previous day results in a new subscriber. The next day through, the street is harder with more obstacles and faster cars.
The game concludes with the Sunday delivery. Papers on Sunday are heavier and can't be thrown as far as the regular dailies. Also, since they're heavier, the paperboy can't carry as many. Successfully delivering papers this day ends the game, but with a newspaper headlined "Paperboy Wins Award For Outstanding Paper-Delivery."
Losing all lives also ends the game with a headline reading "The Paperboy Calls It Quits." Causing all subscribers to cancel their subscriptions results in a headline reading "Paperboy Fired" along with a digitized voice which states "You're fired!" The game was relatively unique in that additional lives could not be purchased by insertion of coins, normally a staple of arcade game design.
The arcade version of the game included a number of voice clips, used both as voiceover commentary at game start ("Paperboy... stopping at nothing in his valiant effort to save this land from TV journalism," e.g.) and as the voice of the paperboy himself when tossing a paper into a mailbox or losing a life. Hitting a few particular obstacles could trigger voice clips specific to the obstacle (for example, a satirical "Let's see you hang ten!" when struck by a skateboarder.)
The cabinet of this game is a standard upright, but with custom controls. The controls consist of a bicycle handlebar with one button on each side, used to throw papers.
Hardware
The game runs on the Atari System 2 hardware. The CPU is a 10MHz DEC T11. For sound and coin inputs, it uses a Motorola 6502 at 2.2MHz. The sound chips are 2 POKEYs for digital sound, a Yamaha YM2151 for music, and a TMS5220 for speech. The protection chip is a Slapstic model 137412-105.
Ports
Paperboy was ported to several home systems for personal use, starting in 1986. In some of these versions, the player could assume the role of a papergirl instead of a paperboy. Paperboy was ported to Acorn Electron (by Andy Williams, 1986), Commodore 64 (by Chris Harvey and Neil A Bate, 1986), ZX Spectrum (1986), DOS (1988), Nintendo Entertainment System (1988), Apple IIGS, Game Boy (1990), Game Boy Color (1999), Atari ST (1989), Amiga (1989), Atari Lynx (1990), Sega Master System (1990),Game Gear (1991) and Sega Genesis (1991). Unlike the arcade version, several of these versions inspired a sequel, Paperboy 2 for the Super Nintendo, and a 3D version for Nintendo 64 called Paperboy 64. More recently, Paperboy was included in Midway Arcade Treasures, a compilation of arcade games for the Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Xbox and Windows released in 2003.
| Image:ElectronPaperboy.png | Image:C64 Paperboy.png | Image:NES Paperboy.png | Image:ST Paperboy.png |
| Acorn Electron | C64 | NES | Atari ST |
| Elite (1986) | Mindscape (1988) | Elite (1989) | Elite (1986) |
Television
The character and world of Paper Boy was featured prominently in an episode of Captain N the Game Master.
External links
Categories: 1984 arcade games | 1984 computer and video games | BBC Micro and Acorn Electron games | Amiga games | Apple II games | Amstrad CPC games | Arcade games | Atari arcade games | Atari Lynx games | Atari ST games | Apple IIGS games | Commodore 64 games | DOS games | Game Boy Color games | Game Boy games | Game Gear games | NES games | Nintendo 64 games | PlayStation games | Sega Genesis games | Sega Master System games | ZX Spectrum games