NES Works #099: Skate or Die! & Paperboy

Video Works by Jeremy Parish

Two games about American youths wasting their lives. Two games with various ties to Atari. Coincidence? Yes, actually. Sometimes, this stuff just happens.

Skate or Die! may bear the Ultra Games branding, but it really owes its existence to Electronic Arts—and ultimately, to the former Epyx crew that EA hired up when Atari Corp. sabotaged that company.

And while Paperboy for NES comes to us from Mindscape, the original game debuted in arcades under the Atari Games label, only to be converted to NES by Tengen (AKA Atari Corp.), who was also filing charges against Nintendo and pilfering documents in order to attempt to sabotage THAT company. It's like poetry... it rhymes.

Production note: NES footage captured from @Analogue Mini. Video upscaled to 720 with XRGB Mini Framemeister.

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