Paperboy review: a bike, a bag of papers, and the worst street in town

A kid on a bike rolls down a suburban street with a bag full of newspapers. The houses with bright colors are his customers. The rest are fair game. Grab the handlebars on the cabinet, steer around the hazards, and flick papers onto porches and into mailboxes as you ride past.

Handlebars and a bag of papers

The arcade version uses real bike handlebars as its controller, and it makes the whole thing work. You turn them to steer and use them to speed up and slow down, and the buttons that throw papers are right under your thumbs. It feels less like working a joystick and more like riding, which is exactly what a paper route game needs.

The street is drawn at an angle, so you are always judging distance as well as direction. A paper that lands on the porch is good. One that goes into the mailbox is better. And you have a limited supply, so you have to scoop up bundles lying on the ground along the way.

Customers, vandals and the Sunday edition

Paperboy's best idea is that you are running a route, not just surviving a level. Miss a subscriber or break their window and they cancel. Deliver to every house and your route grows. The street in front of you is full of skateboarders, cars and rolling tires, and you have to dodge all of it while keeping your aim.

Then there is the fun part the game quietly encourages. Houses that do not subscribe give you bonus points for damage: break their windows, knock over their tombstones. So every run is a small moral balance between good service and mischief.

The week goes from Monday through Sunday, and on Sunday the papers are heavier and slower, a detail anyone who ever carried a Sunday edition understood immediately. At the end of each day you get a training course with ramps and targets, a victory lap for the kid on the bike.

Paperboy is the only arcade game where your job review arrives every morning in the form of canceled subscriptions.

What it meant back then

Paperboy was about a real American job. Plenty of kids in the 80s had a paper route, or knew somebody who did, and standing at the cabinet in a mall arcade or a pizza place felt like a strange joke about your own weekday afternoons. The difficulty settings were even named like streets: Easy Street, Middle Road and Hard Way.

The idea came from real life, too. Dave Ralston, one of the designers, pitched a kid riding down the street delivering papers, drawing from his own childhood paper route, and sketched the first concepts on a cocktail napkin.

Playing it now

Paperboy still rewards a steady rhythm. Ride at a pace you can control, throw a beat early, and remember which houses are yours before you get to them. The handlebars matter, so if you can find a real cabinet, use it. And yes, you can break the windows. Just not your customers' windows.