Paperboy (1985 in arcades, 1988 on the NES) is one of the stranger ports of the era. You pedal a BMX down a suburban street rendered in a tilted diagonal view, hurling newspapers onto subscribers' porches while dodging dogs, lawnmowers, breakdancers, skateboarders, tornadoes and the occasional Grim Reaper.

The scoring is crueler than it first looks. Every house on the street is marked: subscribers have color, non-subscribers are grey. Miss a subscriber's porch, or break one of their windows, and you lose them for good. They stay lost for the rest of the week, which is the run. Lose every subscriber and the game ends whether or not you crashed, which is a failure state almost no other arcade game had.

Against that, the game hands you a free pass on the grey houses. Put a rolled paper through a non-subscriber's window and you get points for it. Their mailbox, their garden gnome, their potted plant: all fair game. It's the only scoring system I can think of that pays you for vandalism as long as you vandalize the right people.

A run is seven days, Monday through Sunday, with the street getting more hostile each morning and a bonus obstacle course at the end of every day. Clear the week and the difficulty resets a notch higher.

The arcade cabinet had bicycle handlebars with a throttle, which is the part the home version could never reproduce. Steering on a D-pad while judging a diagonal throw is famously awkward, though that just made a clean route feel earned.

Weird, charming, and unlike anything else on the shelf. It came out of Atari Games at a point when the arcade business was hunting for ideas that weren't spaceships, and it remains the best answer anyone gave.