Last month at GDC 2019 veteran game maker John Salwitz (Paperboy, Rampart, Klax) delivered a fantastic postmortem of Atari’s 1985 arcade classic Paperboy.
Salwitz helped design Paperboy, and in the course of his hour-long talk he walked the audience through the development process that culminated in the creation of a modern classic.
He also shed light on what it was like to work at Atari in the ’80s, and dug into the nuts and bolts of everything from designing the Paperboy map screen to setting the arcade cabinets up for manufacturing and distribution.
It was a fantastic talk about the science and art of creating a classic, and now you can watch the whole thing for free on the official GDC YouTube channel!
In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.
Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.