Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 278: Paperboy (With John Salwitz)

Episode Date: February 10, 2020

The Retronauts East crew (Jeremy Parish, Benj Edwards, Chris Sims, Ben Elgin) offer a quick overview of the gameplay and culture behind Atari's Paperboy; then designer John Salwitz shares his memories of its creation. Art: Step Sybydlo

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, if you don't subscribe, we'll smash your windows. Hi, everyone, welcome to another episode of Retronauts. This is the most threatening episode of all. And that is because we are talking about a game based on the subscription model, not the games as a service model, but rather the subscription model where you pay a dollar

and the paperboy will deliver. papers for you for a week. And with me here to talk about this ancient video game, we have such cool dudes as Ben Elgin. Chris Sims in an isometric view. No, that's

not correct. No, it's not. What is it? It's oblique. Ombique projection. This time we finally got it right. We got it right, yes. You might be isometric, but then you're skewed and out of proportion with everyone else. Listen,

I did my best for having prepared zero things for this show. Okay, fair enough. And Ben J. Hitch. Who is oblique and obtuse. All right. Well, I'm glad we could confirm that. Yeah, so hi. This is a little bit of a different episode. We've done something kind of like this before, but this is not a full episode of us talking about a video game. What's going to happen is for about 15 minutes-ish. We're going to talk about the game in question paper boy and then we're going to jump over to a developer interview

with the guy who created Paperboy and that's really cool. I didn't write his name down. God, dang it. It's been like a couple of months since I interviewed this guy. Wow. Splice it in in public. We're going to edit it in later. Walter Lurison. We have an interview with Walter Lurysen.

Yeah, so anyway, we're talking to that guy. We're talking to John Solitz. Yeah, okay. Someone who worked at Atari and Eastridge because that's where this was made. What is wrong with me? Anyway, you'll learn a lot about him directly at his own words

in about 15 minutes, so just stick with us through this. Wow. It's been a really hectic month. I don't know what to tell you. Anyway, yeah, so we're going to talk about the game and set up the context for it, and then we'll switch over to the interview segment where a person

who's very important and knows a lot about the game from a firsthand experience can tell you all about it. So that's cool. We're talking about paper boy. So guys, what experience do you have with Paperboy? the video game or the job. My dad was a paper boy.

Was that when he was a boy or a man? He was a boy, Oak Ridge, Tennessee in the 1950s probably. Okay. That was like his first job. Was he one of the Oak Ridge boys? No. This is before, well, I don't know how associated with country music that place was at the time. It was a bunch of nuclear physicists getting together, developing an atomic bomb and stuff. And then the country music came along and they were like, my God, what have, what have I become?

Yeah, death. The destroyer of the radio. Okay. My father was actually... How dare you? The ogrege boys are a delight. I didn't say they're not, but they are also unto the Grim Reaper. Yeah, my father was also a paper boy, but not when he was a boy.

He was a paper man who... I just remember when I was, like, in elementary school, he very briefly would do the paper boy thing, but not really because he would drive, you know, down the street in his car and toss papers, because technology had advanced by that point. Did he break anyone's windows? Not that he told us about. I don't remember any subpoenas or anything, so I think we were okay.

Because I don't know. This is really like, you know, like the way you introed the podcast, like this one thing about this game is it's really kind of this like late capitalist hellscape, right? Where, you know, if you don't subscribe, then it's open season.

It's interesting because we live in a late capitalist hellscape and yet newspaper subscriptions are not a thing anymore. Yeah, it didn't really happen that way. Yeah. It's sort of transplanted a time here. It's a fantasy. these days he would just be like lobbing awful tweets through people's yeah

so should we like for anyway if he hasn't actually played this game and doesn't know what we're talking about yeah for sure you guys haven't told me what your experience with being a paper boy or playing paper boy as yet I actually really like the game I'm terrible at it

yeah but I you know obviously rented it when I was a kid played it in arcades when I was a kid could never I think I made it legitimately to level two And that was it. I've made it to level three once. It's a hard game.

I don't know. Yeah, I don't know that I ever actually played this in arcades. I certainly, I don't think I ever played it with the special arcade controller. This had like this bike handlebar controller, evidently. Oh, I never saw that. Yeah, which I read, which is, this is fascinating. I read it was actually a modified Star Wars yoke. So they took old Star Wars yokes and like transformed them into bike handle bars.

Just a yoke. What about the whites? So, yeah, this is, I mean, I can see it because you're like. Star Wars, you're trying to launch a torpedo down the Death Star Shaps. Here, you're trying to toss papers into someone's mailbox. He spools-eye mailboxes. And your T-16 back home? They're a bigger's canyon.

They're not even as big as two meters. Oh, my gosh. All right. Well, I've played this in the arcade. And I'm pretty sure. This is the deep info that we're looking for. Come on. Also, I read some incredible trivia about this game.

Was it on Vintage Computing.com? But I forgot it. Oh. Badge. there's something really cool about who developed this game and why but everyone everyone just had coffee and I put a little alcohol in his and you can see the effects already yeah some of us only have alcohol but I will say it reminds me of 720 because it's the similar vintage in terms of like I think it may have used the same system board similar resolution graphics and color depth and stuff like that and uh I use the Atari system too it was actually the first game put out on it okay well this is 720 on the system too I think it was a later one on the same one maybe yeah because I remember seeing pay Paperboy sort of everywhere around that time in the mid-80s. This machine was actually kind of common. I mean, it was like...

Yeah, it was a hugely popular game. Yeah. It's really interesting because it's a concept that you wouldn't really think would be a great video game. It is a game in which you play as a Paperboy, and there are no, like, space battles, there are no dungeon monsters. Like, literally, you are just a kid riding your bike down a street. and delivering papers to your subscribers' homes. And if you want some bonus points, you can chuck newspapers into your non-subscribers windows.

It's a very passive, not even passive, aggressive. It's just plain aggressive. It's just plain old aggressive. How hard do you have to throw a newspaper? I mean, they're rolled up. You know, people have been killed, like Flander's wife, you know. She was killed by a T-shirt cannon, so I feel like this is just the same thing.

That's some deep. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry for bringing up the memory of Mod Flanders. Too soon. I'm genuinely surprised that there's not like a, and maybe there is, but like a modern mobile game version of Paperboy, seems like it would be the easiest sell because like all the upgrades are obvious. Yeah, I think there have been some remakes. No one knows that a Paperboy is now. Yeah. Well, I, I, I, I, I, talked, Chris's joke earlier was the modern equivalent was throwing tweets at people.

That's what Chris said, but I said. I feel like they should remake this for VR systems now. Do like an Oculus or PSVR version where you're just chucking and using motion control. That would actually be kind of fun. I think it could work. I feel like one of the reasons for its popularity and the thing that we don't have anymore is that Paperboy was such a ubiquitous pop culture thing, even if it wasn't a like real life thing anymore. Yeah, it's like, you know, in the 1920s, you had newsboys standing there saying,

get your extra paper now! And in the 1960s, you had those people, you know, decentralized away from cities into the suburbs riding bikes. Yeah. And I once read a really interesting article on the sort of obsession

that my generation and the generation immediately before, like Gen X and Millennials, had with older television and how because of cable and because of syndication and the expansion of television, as this

common thing we all sort of got this cultural background of older TV shows like everyone I know grew up with

Brady Bunch everyone I know grew up with like you know Gilligan's Island Gilegan's Island Star Trek Dennis the Menace

and like every kid on all of those old sitcoms that like I was obsessed with and I would stay up all night watching Nick at night

because I was a weird child you know all the kids would have paper boy jobs so it was part of the cultural landscape

even though it wasn't really around anymore, or at least it doesn't seem like it was around. I never had a paper boy. I always had a paper man with a car. And on top, and what comes with that is you've also got this, like, very familiar landscape. So most games are, you know,

some fantastic setting or sci-fi or whatever or just weird, this was the suburbs. Yeah. This, you know, you had your, you were avoiding your suburban obstacles of cars and dogs, which is what you really had to avoid if you went out of your body.

So all the people who are, you know, going to the blockbuster and running video games were these, you know, young white kids who lived in exactly these places. And so it's like kind of, it's navigating your own neighborhood in a game. Speaking of that setting, if you go to the Wikipedia page, I was struck, which I did not do. The person who told me this was struck by the fact that the first picture says that this is set in the United States of America. Like that's the caption of the image of the thing, which is something that's familiar to us, the suburban, you know, landscape. But, you know, if you're from out of the country in the English-speaking world, this might not be...

Yeah, this was developed at Atari Games. It was one of the earliest games that they produced after splitting away from Atari Corp. And so, yeah, they were very much about that sort of suburban Americana, although they were based in, you know, the Bay Area of California. So I think, you know, even to them, it was kind of a little bit of a, like, the suburban fantasy was a little bit removed. Because, you know, as California developed in the latter half of the 20th century, it took on a different texture and quality than like, you know, a neighborhood in Illinois or South Carolina or something.

Yeah, it was a distinctly American setting, which was not that common in video games at the time. And I actually read both. So this comes with a like Wikipedia citation needed on it. So this was put out on NES by Tengen, and apparently it was one of the first NES carts put out of a game developed in the U.S. Hmm. Yeah, it was a decision.

Yeah, somewhere there. It's completely true. But it's definitely, you know. So it has this, it has this very familiar setting of, you know, houses, dogs, streets. Angry people. But then there's a weird wish fulfillment aspect to it where, like, you can just chuck something through your neighbor's window. The downside is that bees will chase you and sometimes you run into the Grim Reaper. And at the end of the level, you're on the front page of the newspaper.

the paper boy, which is a gross violation of journalistic ethics. Well, you're on there for being a hero. Unless it's a rival paper. In which case, you're so good at being a paper boy, the other. This was the tail end of multi-newspaper cities. I mean, when I was growing up, there was the morning paper and the evening paper in Lubbock, Texas, and I would go up to visit family in Flint, Michigan, and they would have two, they would have like the

Flint Journal and some other like Flint Times or something. Yeah, exactly. There were multiple newspapers and that was going away in the 80s. So this was kind of created at the tail end of the relevance of the newspaper as a primary vehicle for news and information. I agree. In fact, as early as the early

80s, I've talked to journalists from back then who knew that everything was going to eventually go the way of computer networks and stuff, even way backed in, but they couldn't convince the people with the money to steer things in that direction. And of course, even if they did, it would eventually get obliterated by competition of too much media.

Yeah. It would be so nice if just someone would come and give me the news once a day instead of it being a constant fire hose into my brain. Don't you miss those days? I blame CNN and OJ Simpson. So, you know, Ben, what you mentioned earlier about this

being, that they're not having been a lot of games set in America. That was you said that, right? to that point. That's true. Like, you know, you play so many games in the A-Bid era that came from Japan, and they're set in, like, you know, the neighborhoods of Tokyo or something. Like, they have this urban setting, anything from River City Ransom to Chubby Cherub. Like, it was just really common to see games come from overseas set in, you know, just normal environments.

But in America made games, if they tended to show American environments, it tended to be like big cities like downtown Manhattan or Chicago or something, you didn't see the suburbs that often. There was not really that element of familiarity. That's probably why Home Alone was so successful too. Like that game sucked. But it was like, wow, I'm running around, you know, shooting dudes with a slingshot in a house. This is cool. Yeah, I'm finding pizza in the toilet. I love it. Yeah. So there was definitely that appeal to it. Like I said, this was, you know, one of the first games created by Atari Games after they're split from Atari Corp. And the company just really fostered creativity in that era. Like if you look at the games they created, you know, 720,

Marvel Madness, Rampart, Paperboy, like all of them had different themes, different concepts, and all of them were, they were really compelling in some way. They were just different from the sort of sci-fi, action, violent, fantasy games you saw. Yeah, they're all iconic and they each had their own conceit. What is the right word I'm thinking of? Like a distinctive

hook. Hook and visual style aesthetic that was distinctive but simple and obvious to grasp easily and quickly.

There's a word for that. They spoke to you. Anyway, yeah, that was a good golden age for Atari games their early years after the split up of Atari. But yeah, it's a fun and pretty simple game, but again, really challenging, and it showed up on every platformer under the sun.

The NES game was incredibly successful. There were sequels that didn't really do much. Paperboy 2 was like... I think I played it on Apple. The same thing, but you could play as a girl if you wanted to, and it didn't have any impact on the game. You were just Paper Girl? I just thought of something. The protagonist is a kid, and you're a kid.

That's what was cool about it. remembered that when I was a kid I wanted to play paperboy because look you're a kid it's like an empowerment thing yeah just like the goonies too yeah just like the guineas too but yeah that's fascinating so there's a Sega master system version of this game it's not too bad I think I played that it was on everything at the time like you know CPC and spectrum and oh yeah I played all those it was it was on everything and uh they usually captured it pretty effectively I think the game Boy version suffered because you already have a limited viewpoint because of the oblique projection. You're like in a tiny corner of the screen.

But you take away, you know, two-thirds of the screen, real estate's pixel space. It's a hard game. Sounds tough. Anyway, I think that's it. So unless you guys have something more to say, why don't we jump over to the interview section? I got one thing. Okay, you got one thing. I have a question for the guy you're going to interview.

Can you pass it out to him? Go ahead. I say this knowing that it's a bad idea But I do kind of want like One of those weird Bionic Commando style remix But of Paperboy But like good Where you're sort of good

Like you're dealing with sort of the The weird side of suburbia But as a paper boy It could be the new gone home That's all I mean I could actually see I could actually see there being like

an optional mode in a grand theft auto game you jump on a bike and hit r3 and all of a sudden the paperboy mission mode starts up and you are just like biking around throwing newspapers at people's homes using the same mechanics that you would use for like uh holding an oozy out the side of your car and shooting up the neighborhood or it could be rock boy i'm picking the expo i don't know why i'm giving rock star ideas for free they don't need it they can give me money from like you know throwing the papers into the mailboxes to like throwing them into the to the mouths of the like Lovecraftian creature is coming out from behind the hedge. Yeah, see, I'm thinking about Paperboy in Silent Hill.

Okay. Interesting. All right, well, before we get crazy like that, why don't we... One more idea. All right. Paper boy on a motorcycle. There we go. That's way too fast.

Well, now that we've taken it too far and ruined it. Chris just died. Let's take things back to the origins and talk to the creator of this game. John Solwitz. In this quarter, on the Greenlit podcast network, Chris Sebs and Matt Wilson. And in this quarter, VHS oddities, confusing animation, and modern not-so classics. Plus snacks, movie fighters. We watch movies and beat them up.

They say with age comes wisdom. Well, over here at the cartridge family, we only have one question. Who are they? Join three imperfect dads as they juggle kids, wives, and jobs, while indulging in their favorite hobby, playing video games. The Cartridge Family, a greenlit network podcast. Hey, Chris, what's the War Rocket Ajax podcast about? Well, Matt, if we were smart, it'd be about murders, but it's actually about comics.

War Rocket Ajax. It's not about murders. but it is weekly on the Greenlit Podcast Network. And this time I am here in the press room with, sorry, what's your, how do you pronounce your last name? Solwitz. Solwitz, John Solwitz, who worked with Atari Games and you're now with Electronic Arts. I am. I am a principal technical director in the mobile part of EA.

Okay. But we're here to talk about old games. So I'd love to pick your brain about the experience of working on, you know, some of these Atari arcade classics in the mid-80s. And we've talked about Atari on the podcast before. You know, it's such a crucial part of video game history. But having the perspective of someone who was there in creating these games, these classics, is a rare opportunity.

So thanks for taking the time to join the podcast. Sure. So, yeah, just kind of going back, you know, Paperboy is kind of the thing you're here for. But I'm curious how you got involved in video games in the first place. What's the backstory there? So I was a, I was always in the 70s, you know, I went to high school in the 70s, a diehard arcade player, although those days it was as much, like in the side of a big store, they'd have games.

So I was playing games like, I'm going all the way back, Lunar Lander Tank or a couple that just jump out of me and go down to the Jersey Shore and get to any arcade I could go to. and play there. And I got a computer science degree from a very small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania. But during that whole time, kept playing games and actually writing games. I'd spend my evenings half in the theater.

And then after that, I'd leave and go to these kind of the lab and just write games. So I was always in love with it. Right out of college, I applied applied to Atari games and received a rejection from Atari games by Postcard, no less. Just basically thanks, but no thanks. It just, it was, it wasn't a big conversation there. So I worked for a year for the Naval Ocean System Center as a programmer reapplied

because I was still playing games like crazy. And I was, got an interview and got a job. So it's just always writing, always, you know, always writing code, always writing games, a diehard player, and that fit right in. Yeah, so what kind of computers were you working on at the time? Mostly such time share, so, well, I go back to punch card and paper tape and stuff like that. IBM 1130, I think, way back there. And then there was a timeshare, which is just, you know, a centralized computer, writing games, writing, stuff in basic, and then in college, I guess I ended up starting work on Vax a lot. It's a

PDP11, basically. It's a lot of deck equipment, stuff like that. Yeah, I'm just old enough to have caught the tail end to the Vax era. But I didn't do any programming. That's never been my, you know, something I've been any good at. Paperways, in fact, built on the T-11, Tiny 11, which is basically a PDP-11 on a chip. Oh, okay. Yep. That's actually very interesting. So you said you applied to Atari games. This was, like, post the sell-off from Warner. It was, you know, after the company split? No, they were still, I started at Atari in 81.

Oh, okay. No, we still worked for Warner. There was still the Warner Company store and everything. Then they, yeah, we split off and basically got sold to Namco during the development of Paperboy. Right. I don't know. I don't remember the exact dates. Right about there.

No, I was there. And when I got it, when I was hired, the day I was hired, I think the, I was hired in a room of about well over 100 people. We all had the orientation together. So it's just peak of Atari. They had just created a new manufacturing line that could crank out like 1,500 units a day. It'd give you some perspective. Hardware or software? Hardware.

Hold games. Wow. Oh, oh, oh, arcade machines. Oh, arcade machines. Oh, arcade machines. That's a ton of arcade machines. That's a target, particularly since by, you know, mid-80s, if you could sell three, five thousand units, total.

That was great news. So you were always working in the arcade division. Yeah, and I started at Atari Games Arcade and ended there. Okay. Before leaving for electronic cards, actually. Okay, so I guess everything that happened, all the drama with the console market didn't affect you as much as it did the people who were working in the console division. But I assume it was still.

So, you know, it hit the company pretty hard. It did. Don Treger, who I talked to not too long ago, was our product marketing lead, described, you know, he'd have a marketing meeting on the coin-up side, and it was all pretty pumped up and positive everything. But then when he went over to the consumer side, it was absolutely dreadful. And so, but I was, I was fairly insulated from this. as I just said in my talk of the you know we we had t-shirts back then that said Atari games you know Atari coin up the real Atari so we were you know we were pretty insulated and and isolated I suppose yeah so what what games did you work on you know before Paperboy

first game I did for Atari was a game that was originally called Aka R and then renamed Sentinel. It was originally a pinball video game but then we couldn't figure out the pinball portion

so we went with a straight video game and we worked on that for about that was my first game at Atari my first game with Dave Walston who was my partner at Atari I was a programmer he was designer artist

So we worked on that for about nine months. Field tested it. It was crushed by Robitron, among other games. So that did last long. And that was it. That was my first. Okay. Did Atari end up actually publishing any pinball video hybrids?

I know, like, Valley Midway had a few. I don't recall Atari ever completing it. Atari did a handful of pinball games, as I remember, but not sure we ever did a hybrid. Okay. It's just difficult, really. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the ones that I, you know, like, what was it, Baby Pac-Man was, like, it was not a great pinball game and not a great video game. And, you know, putting two kind of mediocre halves together did not make a great hole.

So it was an interesting idea, but, yeah, I think just sticking to one strength of the other is probably the way to go. So, you know, beyond, you said it was Sentinel, what kind of projects did you have? That was it. So Dave and I worked on Sentinel, and that did horribly in field tests, so it was sunset. It was killed. And then between that game, by the end of that game and the start of Paperboy was probably three or four months. That was it. Okay.

So you came on in 81. and Paperboy launched in 84, 85? The Paperboy was manufactured at late 84. It was sold first in spring, 1985. Okay. So I worked on Paperboy for about two years from, let me say, my math here, 82 to 84 somewhere in there. That's an unusually long development cycle for a game in that era.

It was, although Atari leadership, was open to that idea as long as you kept making progress and still willing to pretty much prioritize working on your game over every other activity in your life. That was fine. Paperway, I think we developed for it. It was about two years, and I think 720, in fact, was about 18 months, so we were good at longer projects.

Okay, but it seems like they paid off. I mean, Paperboy was a huge hit. It was. It sold well enough. It justified itself. in the arcades by itself. It sold about 3,500 units. But the real win was, of course, when Minescape ported it three years later to the NES,

and it sold something in the order of 2 million units. At the end of the presentation I did today, we asked the audience which they had played. And it's probably 60, 40, people who had played the NES version, actually, and had not really played the coin-out version that much. But the 40% had played coin-out. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely where I kind of got the experience of playing it first. And I feel like I kind of took the game for granted at the time because, you know, it had the handlebar controllers,

which were so integral to the experience. But, you know, at the time, novel controllers were just kind of how things were. Like Spy Hunter had, you know, the steering, wheel and a gas pedal. So you just kind of were like, oh, yeah, it's a weird control system. Yeah, Atari games, the leadership of Atari actually pushed the teams to innovate in controllers. We had a full mechanical prototype shop.

And if you think about controllers at Atari, so Paperboy's controllers, ancestry comes from originally the Battlezone controller, which really became the Bradley controller. Atari did a short-lived game in conjunction with the Department of Defense. That became kind of a tank controller. The tank controller became eventually the Star Wars controller in 83. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the Star Wars controller is really kind of the stepdaddy of the PabroWight controller. Yeah, you know, I guess I've got so hung up on the aesthetics of it,

that I hadn't really stopped to think that it is essentially, you know, just kind of like the Star Wars controller evolved, but that does make sense. But, you know, I think also the difference in the game itself, like the sort of, is it isometric? Is it like... It's an isometric view. Yeah.

It's, it's, it was the inspiration for that view came from Zaxon, although we kind of crushed the X axis and made it parallel to the bottom of the screen. partly largely because they wanted it to be parallel with the controller itself because the whole thing felt a bit odd pushing off angle. So, yeah, it's an isometric, it's kind of 45-degree isometric perspective, which I'm sure has a better name that I simply do not remember. Yeah, and that became the basis of our view, our look.

Dave, when Dave actually proposed the game at a brainstorming session, And his original drawings of the game were in an isometric perspective. So I always knew it was going to be that way. Okay. Interesting. So another thing that really sets Paperboy apart, I think, is just the theme of it, which is so mundane compared to, you know, like at the same time you had games like Dragons Lair and Space Ace and, you know, dig-dug and Sinistar and stuff like these big, high concept.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, but the games actually a lot of the games coming out in that era. When we started Paperboy, we're like a Robotron. Think of more abstract. So moving towards raster-based, pretty intense, hardcore games, but abstract, you know, like they are now, a lot of shooting and stuff like that. Certainly nothing based on the career of a paper deliverer. It actually took me, Dave's idea won the Baharo Dunes brainstorming a session at Atari, but it took me a long time after that, at least probably a couple months, to come around the idea of working on a game based on a paper delivery kid. I was into those hardcore games too.

So yeah, you're right. It was, you know, Dave did a drawing of a kid writing down the street, delivering newspapers, and then avoiding characters. Dave Rolston is who I'm talking about. And so it made plenty of sense. Everybody liked it. It just took me a while to come around to it. Right. Yeah, I mean, like I said, it's very unusual, very, very much kind of the opposite of the fantasy, sci-fi themes you saw in games of the era.

but, you know, when you started working on it, was that the concept from the beginning, like as soon as you sat down and said, let's make this kind of isometric kind of shooter game? Was it always going to be Paperboy? It was always going to be about a kid delivering newspapers. Okay. The adding, you know, and this all came in layers. There was no grand. This game was built through iteration.

So that is about delivering newspapers and avoiding characters and scrolling, so we knew that. So from that, you get, well, you have customers. I expect at the start, when we started developing, everybody was a customer. So we start layering out of that, oh, maybe some of the houses are not customers. And then you have a certain amount of interaction with those houses. Early on, it was that you were smashing the windows in those houses and trying not to smash the windows in your houses. But it was, early themes were very abstract.

Our characters were very early on were quite weird, actually. We had things like pianos running down the street, and we had huge snails like in the driveway instead of cars and stuff like that. I think somewhat what you're talking about is that in that time, a lot of games were really abstract. You had centipede and stuff like that, so that seemed almost natural to us. Right, yeah, and then you had all the games coming over from Japan,

which were just like anything goes. And so that we figured that held until we tested it in focus group and that didn't hold, it didn't work. Players didn't want, it didn't resonate with players. So we went with a more conventional character set at that point, cast. So that's interesting, but that the game actually became more grounded as you got player feedback. It did. We had really good advice around us.

I don't know if we figured it out ourselves or people around us were able to influence us towards kind of that better direction, but we got it eventually, yeah. Yeah, so you mentioned that one of the early concepts was avoidance. Was the idea of having the paper projectiles there from the start, or was it more like a Pac-Man kind of thing where you're really just trying to, to dodge monsters or enemies and not having an active role. I always had delivery early on, and very early on had the concept of driving the kid with a bicycle handlebars. So that mechanic was there.

It was first and foremost about delivering newspapers. So we did that. That was early. And then also early would have been avoiding characters and not running into the sides of houses and stuff like that. So the maze concept, those things. held early on, but then as things started to get layered onto that, as the characters got

more interesting, and they became more aggressive towards the kid, traffic in the street, jump ramps, this kind of layering, that's what really happened. And that, again, had through iteration and brainstorming

largely. So those mechanics were there, but they got added piece by piece. One of the other things that make a bit of the other things that makes Paperboy, I think very unusual among games, is that, you know, it is kind of a shooter and that you have the projectiles that you're throwing, but you're not shooting on the same axis that you're moving. It's, it's, you're actually throwing perpendicular to your movement, which, you know, and there's even kind of like a sort of a forward physics on that where they're not going, where they're not going directly perpendicular

to your character. They're actually, they have some velocity to them. So you have to kind of master that mechanic. Uh, was that something like, I'm, I'm curious about the creative process there and the trial and error. Yeah, they, um, sure. So I would think of the throwing, I know we thought of the throwing of papers and the movement in the game more akin to pinball than a shooter. I think it's got a lot, Dave, remember, Dave Rawson, my partner in this thing had his roots in pinball design. Started Atari about a year before I did and worked on pinball and was a, is, was and is a diehard pinball player. And so if you look at some of the paperboy mechanics, I think there's some of their history is going to come from pinball as much as anything.

I don't think we thought it was a shooter. Neither Dave and I really wanted to work on shooters at all. We really didn't want to work on violent games. The first game I ever worked on that actually had any kind of weapon in it was Rampart, and it's kind of an abstract castle knocking over thing. So we didn't, that really wouldn't have been what we were thinking of. It'd be more about the mechanics of pinball and motion. I have, essentially, I have a physics minor.

So I have always, as a game programmer, I've always used a lot of physics. I've always liked motion a lot. I love that kind of kinetics and stuff like that around that. So there is certain that when I was writing that, I would have had the velocity of the bike be part of the velocity of the paper as it came out of his hand. That's just interesting. Otherwise, it'll look terrible anyway. And yes, you're absolutely right.

What's so amazing about human beings is that we can do that in our brains. Throw an object perpendicular to your view, have it move parallel with your view and aim it. That's still amazing to me. And that's, yeah, that was a great, mechanic because of that. Yeah, I think it's one of those things that, you know, it's like the first time you play, your shots don't go where you think they're going to, and then you kind of quickly

realize, oh, like, you know, there's, you know, the, the papers are tracking the motion that my paper boy is tracking. So you quickly adapt, and it's just that, I think kind of that magic threshold of skill and mastery without being too complex. Like it's a very intuitive concept, but it takes practice. Yeah, and Paperboy is a bit of a plate spinning game too, because while

you're mastering that, you are avoiding other characters in the street, so you're kind of formulating a strategy as to where, how far away from the house is, that same mechanic that you're talking about changes radically if you are in the street versus if you're close to the house.

When you're close to the house, it's much more of a straight line throw, but by the time you get to the street, if you can even get the paper there at all, it has moved substantially as you've translated up the playfield. And then, of course, looking for bundles, managing, you know, which place to throw to or not and all the rest. So it's a lot to, it's a hard game. Right. Well, you know, I think part of that is because your character actually occupies so little of the screen. You know, you basically got the little corner and you don't have a lot of room to maneuver. You don't have a lot of time to react. Right. So that makes it very challenging. But at the

same time you can't memorize it because there's that element of randomness you never know kind of how the neighborhood is going to unfold each time yeah it's actually well the original game is very much a pattern game what makes it feel more random is that the neighborhood reacts to your previous day so um so every it's in the original um there there were very few random values um i think it probably some i'm sure there was some But the, you know, it was like, so as basic as if you lost a house, the owner of that house would become an obstacle in the next round. So that kind of perturated, it changed it a bit. If you, and where are you right on the street, the street triggers different characters, so you don't always see them.

And then there is kind of a day-to-day clock on top of that whole. thing that does give it more of a feel of randomness, but the original game was heavily scripted. Okay, it's been a long time since I played the arcade paperboy. I've played some of the home ports pretty recently, actually, and kind of studied them, but I thought the, like, the houses that you have to hit each day, you know, isn't that randomized from game to game? Oh, okay, okay. Well, that's my mistake then. In the original list, there are 10, you know, you have 20 houses two blocks. Ten of those are your customers. Ten of those are not. If you lose one, if you don't deliver to it, of course, then it becomes the other, and then you can get it back again.

I know it's extremely, it's well fixed, partly because a lot of the houses were designed to be non-customer houses. You can never get them back. You can never earn them. And they're designed to, Dave's designs, they don't even have porches pretty much. It's just all windows. It is an absolute, so this goes to your metaphor right. It is a shooting gallery at that point. and actually I think maybe come back to the whole throwing thing

the customers is a lot more pinball-esque because you're trying to put a paper on a very specific place and not hit it anywhere else that's kind of equivalent to you know shooting a pinball through a specific drop target but the windows on a non-customer are a lot more kind of shooting gallery you really can't go wrong just go nuts

right yeah I referred to it as, you know, kind of being like a shooting game just because, you know, as you say, it comes from Zaxon and you are like a moving object in a scrolling field and you're throwing projectiles. But I do think, you know, the nonviolence of it is a big part of the game's appeal. It's, you know, even 35 years ago we had, you know, the fact that it was a nonviolent game made it kind of novel. Yeah.

You didn't have a lot of, a lot of other games that kind of, you know, took that approach. Yeah, I mean, the basic relationship between characters and their world around them has been mostly the same for most games. It's an incredibly great mechanic. It works. I don't think I'm saying anything revolutionary there. I think we've all figured it out. I'm always blown away, not just in the paper boy, but any games where they really, really work hard to get away from that. If you look at the indie games these days, a lot of times they're trying to get away from that, and that's not easy. And you don't, it's not familiar. People, we are accustomed, we are trained to have a relationship with our world in video games.

And so being able to twist that a bit, it's just successful pays off enormously, like, say, the sins. And so, yeah, it was worth doing. So what do you think it was about the NES version that made it such a huge breakout hit? It was, well, I think that it was on the NES doesn't hurt, that the size of the audience didn't hurt. Sure, but I mean, there were lots of NES games that did not sell two million companies. Well, I think, in all modesty, I think that the Paperboy rule set and world and fiction worked. And I think we laid a very good groundwork for that. It was a, they did a heck of a good job in a port, Minescape did.

I read somewhere by the way that it was the first whole game made in the United States for Nintendo I'd have to check that fact about I believe of so It was definitely one of the first if not the first, yeah

so why they did a good job porting it the fiction and storyline and mechanic were held and I think well actually this is interesting So Atari eventually added Tangan to do their ports. And at the time, part of the theory was, and this is a few years later,

that we would use the arcades to introduce the game. This is a great way to sell games. I mean, think about it. It's a great way to sell games at 25 cents, 50 cents, whatever. Get people familiar with the brand. And then if you bring a true derivative to the home, and that's pretty cool. And that's the job I wanted to do forever because the hardware

at Atari were awesome. Custom hardware is built for your game that were orders of magnitude more powerful than any other game hardware. How cool is that? With custom interfaces. Custom interfaces, custom controls, everything. It is very much equivalent to

working in film and having them do sitcoms based on your work. And so if you had good fiction, if you had good gameplay and all that, it would translate. And that held for a while, but Paperboy particularly had held for, again, largely because they did a really good job in the port,

but it was also a game, it's a hard game that people had really, really wanted to play. It did very well in the arcades, and so it was a great marketing vehicle, too, I suppose. Do you find that, you know, people, younger people these days get Paperboy? Like that, that occupation, the idea of delivering papers as a summer job, you know, that doesn't exist anymore. There's like, by the way, there, yeah. There are a bunch of spoof videos on Paperboy.

I used a couple of them in my presentation today. The one, which is kind of really not that nice, but still it's still pretty funny, is that a bunch of people went out at like 4.30 in the morning and got in the way of this guy. He's in his pickup truck. He is the actual paper delivery person. You know, he throws papers out of his truck

and stood and played all the Paperboy characters. So, no, not really. Interesting enough, Paperboy did well in Europe. And there was very little notion ever of a Paperboy in Europe. I was a paper boy. Dave was a lot more of a paper boy than I was. So, no, I don't think so. They barely understand what a print newspaper is.

So, you know, the game still gets played. I still regularly hear stories of these days. mostly it's like people playing the paper boy with their kid. But no. I don't think they quite understand. What are you doing on a bicycle delivering newspapers? Were you involved with any of the Paperboy sequels or spin-offs? I was not.

Dave was somewhat. In fact, as I recall, I barely knew that they were doing a ninsenged. Nintendo port. I probably was told, but Atari, you know, Atari did not do sequels. There's a couple of things. We've touched on one of them. They pushed the teams to differentiate games based on controller, largely because you notice the controller when you walk up to a game. And they also wanted to, they pushed teams to innovate in game design, which was made it a pretty cool job. I mean, you know, because most developers, you know, they give them the opportunity was like, oh, let's go do a whole new game. And we did. And in time span of

10 years, I did five original titles, one that got killed, as the lead and worked on a couple others as a help during the time I was there. So after Paperboy came out, after a few months break, we tore into 720, and after 720 we tore into Cyberball, and after Sabreball, it tore in a rampart. And so I, you know, I barely knew of the other development. And frankly, you know, I was not disinterested, but I was much more excited about building these whole new games. Sure, yeah.

That was pretty cool. I mean, when I think of Atari games from the mid-80s, it's just like hit after hit, you know, like classics, like Marble Madness, Gauntlet, Rampart, Paperboy, et cetera. It's, you know, that I think that commitment to originality, really paid off. It did. For a while, you know, there was just, you saw an Atari game in the arcades,

you were like, this is different. Like, here's a game where I can team up with three of my friends and just go, you know, fight ghosts and stuff in a maze or... Yeah, and those games were all made in spitting distance of each other. They, the gauntlet lab was caddy corner to the Paperboy lab. Bob Flanagan, who was on the Paperway originally, ended up working on Paperboy and Marble Madness and Gauntlet. So there's Ed Logg and Bob working on Gauntlet, Mark Cerney working on Marble Madness, he was right next to me, Dave Toyer was working on APB, you know, Ed Rodberg was, you know, working on shoes, I mean, just all these games. He lips and it's, you know, working on RBI. These games were all right next to each other, and we were all pretty close friends, too. It wasn't adversarial. It was competitive, for sure. So you could just walk from your lab into the adjunct.

adjacent lab and play a completely different game. Game team sizes ranged from, well, in the 80s probably got as big as eight people on a team as much as that. And several of those people would probably be on a couple different games. But, you know, so you worked by yourself in a lab working on your game. That's where the hardware was. That was where the one version of that game was. You wandered into other people's labs to play their games at lunches. And that's what you did. So, yeah, just to kind of wind this down, I'd love to talk a little bit about Rampert, too, because when I look back, I feel like that was my first introduction to strategy gaming or something akin to strategy. What was the kernel of inspiration for that one? That's a great question. Yeah, and I think I probably had, well, Dave and I partnered very much on that. I was big into strategy and strategy-style games.

We came up with the mechanic of, building, using Tetris style pieces to surround a thing. And that was cool. And we worked that out. But that was not into straight puzzle games. And we had just, oh, that's right, of course. We had just finished a bunch of, you know, both Cyberball won and Cyberwall 2072. So I was really into competitive games too.

able and playing a ton of competitive games. And so turning that into a competitive game probably would have been my best first instinct. I certainly Dave and I were both competitive, but particularly I was. And so it was natural to go from that to that. I have to remember now how we came up with the various aspects of doing the perspective change and all that. That was the first time I worked on True Bitmap, so we could. And I think Day probably pushed for that. The top-down drawing was just not that, oh, yeah, I mean, that was it.

We were trying to contrast the difference between a puzzle look and a battle look. And so we did that. Yeah, Rampart was a blast work on it. I loved it. And we played the heck out of that. That was, we would always have multiple people in our lab playing the heck out of that game daily. It was pretty fiercely competitively, at Atari. So I'm trying to remember.

It's been a long time since I've played Rampart, you know, the arcade version, but that was a trackball game, right? Originally, trackball. We were thoroughly convinced that it could never be a joystick until we put a joystick on it. I went like, oh, it works great on joystick. It's actually kind of easier. Rampart, the Rampart sequels,

Franz Lenziger ended up doing a really good sequel of Rampart, but a lot of the sequels are really horrible because the controller gets wrong. If you don't nail the controller in that game, there is no game. It's just bad. And so the trackball was really natural, but as a cost-cutting, I think we did a three-person trackball version, and then Atari wanted to do a two-person,

and we tried joystick, which I think I was kind of pushing against until we did it, and I went like, oh, my God, this works really well, and so we went that way after that. Yep. Okay. So, you know, what kind of projects have you worked on beyond Atari? After leaving Atari, Dave and I went to work at Electronic Arts together. We did a game called Hunting, starring Poltergeist, which is kind of a, it's a sim game, really. It's about you try to, you play the role of a ghost, trying to scare everybody out of a house. It was on the Genesis. EA had a short-lived coin-up. We actually went there to start their coin-up division. It took me a very long time to realize that the arcades were dying.

I'm in a really long time. Not because I had a lot of success there, so it was hard for me to give that up. But the coin-up division got closed, so we started our own company, amazingly, in arcades, and trying to do arcade games in the mid-90s. I mean, PS1, it just come out, and we still wanted to do arcade games. And we did a few things there.

We did a game called Vapor TRX, which is kind of this flying racing game in my group. Did Running Wild, and then we did a version of a pretty cool baseball game. We've been a diehard baseball fan, so it was Dave called World Series Baseball. Okay. Did that. And then eventually I left a Blue Shift, and I've been. at EA since working on much larger titles. Not creatively.

I get pushed into management at some point, and then... Happens are the best of us. It is really. And then now I'm a technical director working with multiple teams. All right. Well, I really appreciate you coming in and kind of sharing your anecdotes about Paperboy and Rampart. If people want to find you online and follow your work, where should they look?

It's a great question. LinkedIn? Okay. I do a pretty horrible job of having much of an online presence. LinkedIn's a good place to find me if you want to get a hold of me. Then otherwise you kind of look at the credits at EA, I suppose you can find you there too. Okay. Well, John, thank you for your time.

Of course. Thank you so much. I don't know.