If you need proof of the power of videogames, look no further than Paperboy. What other medium could transform quintessential summer-job drudgery into a diversion kids couldn't wait to get their hands on? Granted, you didn't have to wake up at 4 a.m. to service the virtual customers on your Game Boy, and you didn't have to haul your ass around the neighborhood to do it, either. But that was then. Now, thanks to sophisticated motion-sensing technologies and cutting-edge virtual reality hardware, we have PaperDude VR, an updated version of the classic game that's very nearly as exhausting as the job that inspired it all in the first place.
PaperDude VR, an unofficial homage to the Atari original, was created by Globacore, an interactive outfit in Toronto specializing in custom, branded videogames. The gameplay is old-school Paperboy: You chuck papers at subscribers' houses, racking up points for hitting mailboxes and bleeding them when you accidentally hurl one through a window. The experience of playing the game, however, is radically different. Instead of sprawling backwards on your couch and squinting down into your Game Boy's tiny pea-soup screen, here, thanks to an Oculus Rift headset, you find yourself transported into a vivid, panoramic (but still charmingly blocky) world. Rather than mashing buttons, you actually have to act like you're throwing papers, with every movement tracked by a Kinect camera. And because your in-game locomotion is connected to a real, stationary bike outfitted with a KickR speed tracker, you'll have to do some pedaling, too.
Still, from the video clip above, the virtual paper route looks like highly enjoyable work. Ben Unsworth, Globacore's founder, concurs: "It's amazingly satisfying when you get one of the papers in a mailbox," he says. "It's also entertaining throwing one through a window and hearing the smashing sound." Right now the game's a rough prototype, but his team hopes to add more elements from the original down the road, like the rogue lawnmowers and breakdancers, and the the exceedingly frustrating dirt bike interlude at the end of each stage. Of course, there's a rich irony here. It's 2013, and regional print newspapers are wilting like flowers. Yet here we are, resurrecting them as digital objects with bleeding-age gaming technology. In a sense, PaperDude VR isn't just tapping into our nostalgia for Paperboy, but for the golden age of paper routes in general. Heavy.
>"It's amazingly satisfying when you get one of the papers in a mailbox."
On a technical level, though, the project is fascinating simply for giving us a slightly different take on what the incipient wave of low-cost virtual reality could bring. Instead of showing us other hyper-realistic worlds, vistas that strive to be as detailed as the ones we see with our own eyes, gear like the Oculus Rift could also whisk us back to the places we spent so much of our youths: the worlds of our favorite videogames. Maybe Mario Kart doesn't thrill you like it once did, but what if it put you down there behind the wheel, in first-person, looking over your shoulder at a fast-approaching green shell? Or if you had to navigate the dim corridors of Pac-Man's iconic maze through the eyes of Pac-Man himself? That might actually be pretty terrifying. But the point is that virtual reality could yield an entirely new breed of spin-offs and sequels, ones that took familiar games into all-new territory.
But in the case of PaperDude VR, the pleasure isn't just about revisiting a fondly remembered videogame. Even in the game's pixelated suburbia, Unsworth says, there's fun to be had just riding around. "Since I'm not a daily biker, I'm often surprised whenever I'm outdoors on a real bike about how pleasurable that simple experience of movement is. Amazingly in this game you get that," he explains. "Sitting up at the end of the game and freewheel coasting through the Game Over finish line, hands off the handlebars, snaps me back to my youth–the part not spent in front of the computer."
