Yea, though I bike through the suburbs of death…

By a show of hands…or comments, I guess…how many of you had a paper route as a kid? Any of you slip through the cracks of child labor laws that somehow determined that riding a bike around town during the pre-dawn hours didn’t constitute any form of endangerment or deprivation of education? Because if I wanted to strut through the fifth grade flashing huge bankrolls (usually dimes or quarters) the only options I had as a pre-teen involved walking the streets delivering our small town gazette riddled with spelling errors, inaccuracies, and menial events passing off as news, or I could lug bags full of steel clubs through a field dodging little white balls careening towards my head at 290 kilometers an hour (180 mph for my American readers). But alas, I never had a paper route. So ironically, instead of having a job to enable my horrible video game addiction, I played a video game to simulate the experience of having a job.

Include this under “signs you don’t have a large enough news market to sustain a newspaper.”

Released for the arcade in 1985, Paperboy faithfully re-creates all the obstacles and challenges of delivering newspapers, including urban terrain, rabid dogs, careless motorists, swarms of bees, runaway lawnmowers, zombies, and the specter of death. As the paperboy, the game tasks you with never stopping your bike–the newspaper doesn’t pay you to lallygag, after all–and chucking your papers at everything that does or does not move. For every bundle of papers you pick up, you may toss one or two at someone’s doorstep–or extra points for their mailbox–but the rest you need to take down zombies, stop lawnmowers in their tracks, and threatening and vandalizing anyone with the audacity to not subscribe to the Daily Sun. That last note raises a point of interest, since all the Sun headlines revolve around the paperboy himself–thus rendering it only slightly more interesting than my hometown’s Mining Gazette–usually commenting on either his failure to deliver papers or his attempts at vandalism. I’d think, given the scenario, non-subscribers probably wouldn’t feel all that compelled to spend money to learn about the destruction of their own property, and any subscriber who failed to receive a paper wouldn’t necessarily need a Ph.D. to figure out the content of anything they missed.

Accurately simulating all the targets, ramps, moving jumps, and mechanical spikes you’ll encounter in your chosen profession as a delivery boy.

At the end of each day’s route, you navigate through a training course, a testament to the 30-year vintage of the game, since no employer in 2015 would dare pay to ensure quality and competence in their employees. On the other hand, wasting money on newspapers for the purpose of cluttering up people’s yards and smashing windows to extort subscription money sounds exactly like current business practices. Still, the thought of putting money into researching a throwable paper with the power to stop a Model-A dead in its tracks sounds both wonderfully progressive and about as useless as a Jehova’s Witness knocking on St. Peter’s Basilica. But I guess all these little inconsistencies just help to make Paperboy a timeless classic.

All right! Just a few more customers to piss off and I won’t have to lift a finger anymore!

The game doesn’t pull any punches. Essentially an eclectic obstacle course, you have to correctly identify customers’ homes and place the papers precisely on their doorsteps or mailboxes. Just a bit off, though, and you’ll ensure the tunnel-visioned morons will never find the papers, and you’ll lose them as customers. Also, they’ll cancel their subscription if you break one of their windows, or just miss their house entirely. You can earn new customers by making perfect deliveries for one day. Allegedly. Developed for the arcade, Paperboy aimed to take your money from you as fast as you could throw papers to earn it, so you have about as much chance at making a perfect delivery as you have of finding a girl on an Internet dating site who doesn’t want to you to sign up for her webcam subscription.

Just a guy with his jack hammer out pounding the side walk. Completely innocent.

Parents worried about violent games never even stopped to consider the vicious cycle in Paperboy–you play a paper-throwing simulator, thus compelling you to chuck newspapers like you brought a wheelbarrow full of rocks to an Old Testament stoning, only to earn more money to throw away at the arcade. Don’t you miss the 1980s? (Keep an eye on the skies…Doc Brown should show up with his DeLorean soon, if you want the chance to steal it) But as much as I enjoy Paperboy (with the arcade version slightly beating out the NES version), I don’t really like bikes much at all. My hometown–as well as my current town–both grew out of hillsides. So half the time I tried riding a bike, I’d either careen downhill in a sonic boom of panic, or slowly trudge uphill in a slow painful, slog, like a slave rowing a viking longboat. That might also explain why my local paper eventually replaced the traditional paper boy with a middle-aged woman with three teeth and an SUV, who would drive right up onto people’s lawns so she didn’t have to get out of the car to stick the papers in the mailboxes. So to celebrate my hatred of a transportation method that requires me to balance all my weight on a hard rubber knob under my testicles, next week I’d like to turn to a historically more traditional and far less painful mount: the ostrich.