Current Games

<p>Paperboy is an arcade game developed and published by Atari Games. It was released in North America in April 1985. The player takes the role of a paperboy who delivers a fictional newspaper called “The Daily Sun” along a suburban street on his bicycle. The player attempts to deliver a week of daily newspapers to subscribing customers, attempts to vandalize non-subscribers’ homes and must avoid hazards along the street. Subscribers are lost by missing a delivery or damaging a subscriber’s house.</p> <p>The game begins with a choice of difficulty levels: Easy Street, Middle Road and Hard Way. The object of the game is to perfectly deliver papers to subscribers for an entire week and avoid crashing (which counts as one of the player’s lives) before the week ends. The game lasts for seven in-game days, Monday through Sunday. <sup id="cite_ref-ahist_4-0" class="reference"></sup>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, with subscribers living in brightly colored houses, and non-subscribers living in dark houses.<sup id="cite_ref-rgamer_3-1" class="reference"></sup></p> <p>The player scores points for each paper delivered successfully, and more points if they throw it into the mailbox, as well as breakage points by damaging the houses of non-subscribers. A perfect delivery results in all the points being worth double for that day. At the end of each stage is a training course with various obstacles to throw papers at and to jump over, and the player scores a bonus for finishing the course. Crashing on the course ends the round, but does not cost the player a life.</p> <p>When a player fails to deliver a paper to a house, the resident will cancel their subscription, and the house turns dark. Doing a perfect delivery can gain back subscribers previously lost.</p> <p>In Japan, <i>Game Machine</i> listed <i>Paperboy</i> on their November 1, 1985 issue as being the fifth most-successful upright arcade unit of the year.</p>

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