Like many of Atari Games' releases in the mid-1980s, Paperboy was a novel idea that stood out from its competition, especially with its controls resembling a set of bicycle handlebars. While a novel idea is enough to attract players, a good game is necessary to keep them. Paperboy is more than just a good game: the game play is tight, the graphics are beautiful, and the audio is ear candy.
Arcade Paperboy was the first game to use Atari's System 2 hardware. Similar to the System 1 hardware used in games like Marble Madness and RoadBlasters, System 2 was designed to offer modular arcade cabinets that could play any number of compatible games. The most notable improvement over System 1 was the higher resolution graphics, allowing sharper detail of everything on screen. Paperboy uses this advantage to create the houses and residents of Easy Street, Middle Road and Hard Way in beautiful, sometimes beautifully comic, detail. Of course, memory constraints were still a big factor in game design in 1984, and for Paperboy to offer such detail, a lot of recycling was necessary. This means every convertible facing left, every station wagon facing right, every child on a three-wheeler, every teenager on a skateboard, indeed all of each type of character and vehicle looks exactly the same in the game, without even any color swaps. Arguably this takes away from the game's realism, but really it does something better: it creates an amusingly surreal landscape that seems to be what a lot of real neighborhoods were trying for back then. Here was suburban conformity, in all of its colorful sameness. What self-respecting kid with a bag of window-breaking, people-zapping newspapers wouldn't want to tear things up a bit?
The music of Paperboy also deserves special recognition. This is the first and maybe only time jazz music came from an arcade game, and the main theme rivals even OutRun's "Magical Sound Shower" as one of the best remembered video game tunes of the decade. Just mention video games and start playing a cowbell, and anyone who ever set foot in a 1980s arcade will soon be humming along.
Paperboy's success earned it a lot of conversions to home systems and even two non-arcade sequels. But the best is still the original, and it is excellent.