Classic Game Postmortem: Paperboy 

It's amazing seeing developers being more and more open about older games.

I've been waiting for this postmortem for 30 years! Earl Vickers sent me one of those 720 Degrees records and I still have it in the envelope on my bookshelf! I'd love to find out more about Hal Canon, those guys made great music!

My wife and I grew up in Europe, and paperboy was there too. The streets and houses look much different there. When we came to the US we both had this response that "Wow , the streets and houses really do look like this!". Sometimes when we walk through a typical western-american (east coast is different) neighbourhood, it still feels like we're in a real life computer game.

What a wholesome guy !

26 min in and I’ve had 4 ads already. Never had a single ad on any other GDC talk.

I haven't heard many stories about arcade development before, but it's really interesting seeing how much the environment has changed!

What a trip down memory lane. This was one of the first games I ever played on the C64.

I remember seeing a band new cabinet of paperboy in Dublin in 85 and being amazed by the bmx style handle bars. I loved it and still play it to this day on my ps2. I’m old school now I guess This was a great video to watch. I miss the 80s arcades so badly. I’m not really into modern stuff 😩 😎✌🏻☘️

Great talk, loved Paperboy on my Gameboy back in the days and i broke a lot of windows

I loves these talks! So glad GDC puts them online for all to see. I played Paperboy in the arcade at least a little and own it for the NES (and Paperboy 2 for the SNES).

28:55 It goes against how I try to structure my games, but it 100% had this effect on me when I played the NES version. It's amazing how things changed for me, back in the day I could literally follow a singular straight path and feel like I found a ''secret'' at the end. Nowadays, I'll find genuinely hidden content without any real surprise, hell, in some games it feels like they're just arbitrarily hidden, leading me to do silly things like tediously walking into/hitting walls. Even when the game is good about cleverly telegraphing secrets, there is FOMO that makes me feel like I COULD be missing a hint, and thus it's back to brute force.

Wow, what an excellent presentation and wonderful video, absolutely fascinating! Thanks for this! :-) Paperboy was the first arcade game that totally captivated me as a kid. The happy memories will always be with me, and I am a life-long fan of the YM2151 music chip! Great to hear about the amount of work and scrutiny that went into the development. And the best bit… 35:26 LOL :-) :-) :-)

Great postmortem for a real classic!

Thanks John for the talk and for the game!

hahaha the acid comment....what a great story of the project

Wow - What an amazing account of the creation of a classic. I would love to see something like this for 720; largely developed by this same group. Skate or Die!!

Thanks for posting this...really good.

Thank you Sir, for making my favorite game to this day

I’m currently writing a script “Finding Hal Canon”.

I only ever played the first Paperboy in its ZX Spectrum port probably around 1989 (I was only born in 1985) but this was a wonderful video! Thank you, mr. Salwitz, for this amazing presentation! (Also, PDP-11 was an amazing machine and 6502 was a pain in the butt lmao)

Fun to imagine this arcade machine with the controller being an actual bike/hometrainer and a screen attached to it. It would have been a big hit in fitness studios back in the day! This should have been possible even in 1985 considering Hang On which Sega released it around the time. The controller was a (cheap-looking) replica of a motorcycle that had a monitor instead of a windshield attached. They improved on this design later on with something resembling more of an actual motorcycle and a bigger screen in front of it. 2019 this would amount to Paperboy being played with an UHD screen or VR-Headset, Motion-Tracker, and a strong possibility of being thrown off the bike if some obstacle is being hit or when leaning over too much to either the left or right. The trainer would of course be a Schwinn classic bike for that extra retro feeling!

LOVED THIS GAME AS A KID! :D

Such a great postmortem!

I loved this game

I played the hecc out of this game on SEGA Genesis. The music was so catchy, and the voice samples were hilarious! By the way, I'm still wondering where I can buy that acid.

Whenever I see the paperboy's face I think of ''MY CHEEKS ARE BLEEDING :)'' from Gamegrumps

The memories

It's so interesting to see how 30 years ago, this simple game was deeply brainstormed and designed by a bunch of professionals, when today this is made within a few hours by just one guy in a Game Jam competition.

The lack of a conventional controller insured, to this day, a unique gaming experience that cannot be fully emulated with mere roms alone.

This was possibly the first computer game I ever played, on an Amstrad CPC in the late 80s, maybe six years old

Cool. Boy did I drop a lot of quarters into Paperboy at 7-Eleven back in the mid 1980s.

That controller test sounds a lot like Nokias "Gorilla" test. Just handing it over to a big guy with the message, "break it". :P

Dope.

I remember this game was hella popular at my daycare. Excited to hear the thought process behind their design choices.

Maybe someday we can get John Salwitz to talk about Rampart.

Lost my shit when I saw this vid exists. This game is one of the reasons I decided to pursue videogame development.

512x384? That sounds very familiar. In fact, it's exactly one-quarter of XGA, the most common resolution for computer monitors in the 1990s: 1024x768. (512 is exactly half of 1024 and 384 is exactly half of 768). Cool.

He sounds exactly like Pierre Bernard from Conan O'Brien.

Zaxxon, I've been trying to figure out the name of that one forever

Where can I find the full cut of that live action trailer?

so crzy taxi, inter loper

So this was the origin of all the "_JOB_ Simulator" games?

The sequel was called Ms. Paperboy.

2:37 Akka Arrh

Look up 'Angry Video Game Nerd Paperboy' for a good laugh.

Funny listening to Atari Employees. Atari Arcade division? Best job ever. Atari home division? Coding slaves that were undervalued and regularly disrespected by higher ups.

I shared this on Facebook, then got a warning notification and they took it off of my timeline. WTF is that all about!

Corporate lackey bragging about working 8 days out of 7 days in a week.