Paperboy 2

I first saw Paperboy at an arcade machine in my local cinema around 1989. Back then, it seemed absolutely insane to me that someone had come up with the idea of making an arcade game about delivering newspapers. Two years later, I was running the same thing on my home PC and wondering why it still kept me entertained.

Paperboy 2 from 1991 by Tengen is a direct sequel to the original arcade game by Atari Games. The principle remains the same: you ride your bike down a suburban American street, throw newspapers into customers' mailboxes, and try not to crash, collide with, or get killed by every obstacle that crosses your path. The novelty compared to the first game is the ability to play as a girl, which was a understated but likeable gesture for the early nineties.

The gameplay is pure arcade — no depth, no strategy. You ride from left to right, aim newspapers at the correct houses, while it's ideal to demolish non-subscriber houses with broken windows and flower pots. Lives disappear quickly, obstacles multiply, and the route gets slightly more complicated each day. Keyboard controls on PC were functional back then; nowadays most people would probably set up a gamepad. The difficulty ramps up smoothly, but in higher rounds the screen becomes an obstacle course where surviving the entire delivery requires a level of concentration disproportionate to a game about a paperboy.

What keeps Paperboy 2 afloat even today is exactly what worked back then — short loops, immediate feedback, easy chaos. The DOS version doesn't shine graphically, the Sound Blaster audio was acceptable but nothing more. The game looked better on consoles; the PC port was solid more in terms of gameplay than visual presentation. The game's humor — dogs, lawnmowers, crazy characters running around the street — aged surprisingly well because it was deliberately over-the-top from the start.

Today Paperboy 2 is perfect for anyone who wants ten minutes of pure arcade reflex training without installation, tutorials, or upsell screens. It runs without problems in your browser via DOS game emulators. It's not a game you'll spend the weekend with, but it's a game where half an hour will clear your head. Which, after all, was its only ambition from the very beginning.