Forgotten by most, beloved still among those who remember, Pooyan was one of the most unique and challenging video games ever created. Legend has it that Donkey Kong Champion Billy Mitchell once spit a huge mouthful of Sunkist Orange Soda  on one of these machines when someone asked him to give it a spin, but he’s always been jerk, hasn’t he? It wasn’t “manly” enough for him, apparently. Who was he trying to kid? You play video games, dude—you’re not exactly a smokejumper!

I can proudly say that it is in my personal top five video games of all time. And honestly, Pooyan doesn’t need some blog entry by the likes of me to rehabilitate its image. Those who know, know. I have it on good authority that both the famous Japanese actor Pikachu and a certain red-hued Teletubby named Po, both consider this a favorite. Better company to be in, I am certain, than some 50 year old mullet-headed guy who still carries a comb in his back pocket. Yeah, that means you, Billy…

Pooyan featured pigs and wolves. The pigs were adorable and good, the wolves were kind of adorable but very bad. They kidnapped a few unlucky porkers but wanted more, so the pigs had to defend themselves by rigging up an ingenious gondola contraption, from which one of them could shoot arrows at the wolves, who used the more primitive method of hot air balloons to get at the pigs. An aerial battle royale! Pooyan was pretty much ignored by most arcade junkies of the day, which meant that if you did like it, you never had to wait around for the machine to clear. This was a good thing, because it was a lot of fun!

When you really stop to think about it, it’s pretty bizarre to glorify a lame-ass pre-teen job by making it into a video game, (what was next—Lawn Cutter? Dog-Washer? The Daring Adventures of a Burpee Seeds Salesman?) I mean, aren’t video games supposed to take the player away from the hum-drum realities of their daily life? In any case, this game used real handlebars as a controller and that was pretty unique. But it hardly seemed the kind of thing that was going to get the blood racing and eyes twitching in adrenalized bursts of excitement. The houses and cars and pets of the virtual world in Paperboy were like a modern-day Norman Rockwell version of Anytown, USA, but there were some real dangers lurking out there—radio-controlled toy tanks, break dancers, street brawlers, and a gang of mohawked punks on unicycles, although I may be remembering that last one wrong.

At least the parents of Paperboy fanatics could rest easy knowing their children were living out their “fantasies” by benignly chucking around rolled-up newspapers instead of mowing down people with fully automatic weaponry or blowing up planets. The nicest touch of all was the epilogue to this game when the player would get immortalized in the very publication he had been hired to distribute. If you were a good paperboy, you got your picture on the front page holding a trophy. If you were a reckless paperboy who had been mowed down by one too many Stutz Bearcats and thus died before your knapsack had been properly emptied, the banner headline would read “Paperboy Call it Quits.” If you were an incompetent buffoon of a paperboy who had managed to stay alive but lost all his subscribers due to bad aim, the headline read “You’re Fired”–always accompanied by a few choice quotes from querulous ex-customers: “Worst Ever” “Scum on Wheels” “Total Shit.” Fun stuff!