The lost art of throwing papers into your neighbor’s window.
PLAYERS: 1-2 alternating
PUBLISHER: Mindscape, Inc.
DEVELOPER: Tengen
GENRE: Arcade
RELEASE DATE: December 1988
I’ve never personally bicycled through a neighborhood at four in the morning, groggily hucking papers at doors. If Paperboy is realistic in any way, I’m glad I avoided the profession. Annoying dogs, skateboarders, dudes desperately trying to pull up their pants on the sidewalk, renegade lawnmowers, tornadoes, and the Grim Reaper are just a few of the characters trying to prevent your daily paper delivery.
Your goal is simple, true, and American: throw papers at subscribing houses. Throwing papers sounds easy enough, but many of the houses sit at angles where chucking them head-on will not suffice. Curve those buggers! Slow down, speed up, do what you need to do, just don’t piss them off by not delivering their paper. You’ll know your subscribers by their house colors of white, blue, and yellow. Red houses are not your subscribers nor are they anyone you want to associate with; they’re the eerie neighbors that are most likely hiding bodies in their basements. Feel free to break their windows or dump over their trashcans for points.
Should you succeed in delivering a paper to every house, you will be “rewarded” with a new subscriber, a former red house seeking to repent of its body-collecting ways. It will take a lot of paperboy skillz to keep all your customers and gain new ones, but if you lose them, don’t fret. You can still beat the game with only one customer (although your fellow paperboys won’t think much of you, I’m sure). There’s also a random training stage at the end where you can hone your paper chucking and bicycle control. Get to the end of the stage and three bored people will cheer you for your efforts! Make it through a road-rash filled week of nightmares and your name will be forever emblazoned at the Daily Star. Paperboy may not entertain as much as the Sunday comics, but it’s a solid arcade translation that doesn’t skimp on the insane.
B
Latest posts by Dylan Cornelius (see all)
- By Request – New Ghostbusters II - April 4, 2014
- The 86 Worst NES Games – Part 4 - April 1, 2014
- The 86 Worst NES Games – Part 3 - March 29, 2014
10 replies on “#469 – Paperboy”
I like this game more than I should. I think it’s the satisfying “ding!” when you land a paper.
I didn’t like this game but it is a NES classic.
LOVED Paperboy and especially the Super Nintendo version. Cant remember the first one where you can stop the robbery midway through the level but that was the most satisfying thing ever.
@AverageJoeEveryman: Never played the Super Nintendo version, but always wanted to. I think Paperboy 2 had the robbery in it.
A classicly brilliant, yet slightly monotonous game. You have an ambitious goal man. Follow your dream.
– Maurice
http://www.thegeektwins.com
@Maurice: thanks! One game at a time.
I can still hear the music in my sleep.
Another one I just never got into. Maybe I was bad at it, but I mostly think it was that there were better games going on at the time.
I never tried part 2 or the SNES one, but I don’t feel like I am missing out really.
Still as Tom pointed out, it is a classic NES game.
Sleepyweasel
The arcade version was even harder because you had to use an actual bicycle handle bar to control the paper boy. Of course if you don’t count mame the Genesis/Megadrive port of this game is the closest you can get as far as an accurate port of the arcade version is concerned. To quote my seven year old, “That must be a really bad neighborhood if Death lives there.” It’s a lot of fun to rail on the windows and enemies with some codes. My favorite always was the red guy who comes flying out of the house at you with a knife. And then if you crash he continues to stab you just to make sure you won’t get up and deliver more papers.
This doesn’t look nearly as good as the SMS version