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July 27th, 2020 
Carl Williams 
Paperboy was originally released in arcades in North America in 1985. Atari Games took the idea for the game from the job that many teenagers take on to earn additional money. Over the following decades Paperboy would see ports to many home consoles and computers. Now an independent homebrew developer is working on a port for the Mattel Intellivision console.
Paperboy had unique features
The game play for Paperboy is angled and off putting at first play. It takes a bit of getting used to, especially aiming newspapers properly. Even though you can speed up, or slow down, slightly the game is on autopilot. This means you are having to react more to the obstacles and positions of safe drops for the newspapers.
The neighborhood denizens are not exactly nice either. They have placed gates across the sidewalk, drive erratically, and generally do not care for your safety. You probably should be getting hazard pay working this route.
Porting to Intellivision
Matthew Kiehl, someone I have talked about before, is the mastermind behind this port. He is using IntyBASIC for this process and the results are quite impressive.
Just look at the above embedded video for proof of that.
What is interesting about this port is just how faithful it is to the arcade original. Sure, some detail is lost in the conversion, but the arcade game was not all that detailed in the first place.
Do not get too excited
Unfortunately, we do not get to see if Kiehl has been able to program in later levels. All we get to see in the YouTube video is part of one neighborhood. Anyone that has played Paperboy can tell you, there are some wild areas to peddle through.
It is not clear if we will see a physical, or ROM, release for Paperboy on the Mattel Intellivision console. It would be interesting if we did. Who would grab a copy?
For more arcade games check out these articles.
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