Postal

HISTORY

Postal is a 1997 isometric shoot 'em up video game developed by Running with Scissors and published by Ripcord Games. The player controls an anonymous gun-toting man (informally dubbed the "Postal Dude") as he commits mass murder in the town of Paradise, Arizona under questionable circumstances. Each level sees players killing a given percentage of police officers, military personnel, and other armed "hostiles" before being allowed to progress, optionally slaughtering unarmed civilians caught in the crossfire.

Running with Scissors (RWS), having previously developed licensed child-friendly games as Riedel Software Productions (RSP), sought to make Postal as outrageous as possible. Inspired by Robotron: 2084 (1982) and the act of "going postal", the game made use of isometric and top-down visual perspectives to distinguish it from the growing first-person shooter market.

Upon its release for Mac OS and Windows in September 1997, Postal received a mixed reception from critics for its short length, unconventional controls, and repetitive gameplay. The game sparked controversy for its violence and gore, and was subsequently banned from several retailers and countries. The United States Postal Service filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against RWS before the game's release, and the case was eventually dismissed in 2003. An add-on to the game titled Special Delivery released in 1998. Postal would gain a cult following and become a franchise, with the direct sequel Postal 2 releasing in 2003. Following its original release, the game received ports to Linux, Mac OS X, Android, and Dreamcast. The source code of Postal was released under the GNU GPL-2.0-only license in 2016, and the game later became freeware in 2019.

A remake of the game, Postal Redux, was released for Windows in May 2016, followed by Linux in 2018, Nintendo Switch in 2020, and PlayStation 4 in 2021.

Gameplay

Postal is a shooter with isometric projection. Movement is always relative to the orientation of the player character (named "The Postal Dude"). The player, therefore, must always be aware of the direction the character is facing, which can be difficult to some players on the isometric maps.

There are eight weapon slots, each with a fixed amount of maximum ammo. The default weapon is a weak machine gun with unlimited ammo. Although it serves no practical purpose, the player can conceal their weapons by pressing the tilde key.

Plot

In the fictional Arizona town of Paradise, an unidentified man (commonly referred to as the "Postal Dude" or "Postal Guy") enters an armed confrontation with fellow residents and law enforcement outside his home. Diary entries provided in the game's instruction manual reveal that the man is a recent evictee, believing himself to be the only individual unaffected by an alleged "sickness" causing violent behavior among the town's population. Theorizing a connection between the illness and the local air force base, he embarks on a lethal journey across Paradise, fighting his way through a ghetto, train station, ostrich farm, and other locales to reach the base. It is implied that the protagonist is being tormented by a demonic presence; the level intermission screens feature text detailing sadistic violence, and a hallucinatory voice (voiced by Rick Hunter) can be heard absurdly taunting victims throughout gameplay.

After raiding the air force base, the protagonist is shown attempting to massacre an elementary school in a non-playable sequence. His weapons have no effect on the children despite his efforts, and he collapses as the school blurs around him. After the elementary school scene, hellish images of bondage and confinement inside an asylum are displayed while an unknown voice gives a report on the protagonist's mental state and motive for his rampage. During the voice's closing remarks, a tortured scream can be heard as the screen rests on a bolted-shut cell door cloaked in darkness.

In the Postal Redux remake of the game, the elementary school sequence is replaced with a new endgame where the player witnesses the burial of an unknown person in a decaying field. Completion of the game on the hardest difficulty features the inclusion of an unknown man and woman mourning over the grave as it descends. Both outcomes prompt a similar collapse of the protagonist and an identical asylum cutscene, now consisting of animated shots over the original release's still images.

Development

By the mid-1990s, Arizona-based work for hire game developer Riedel Software Productions (RSP) had grown creatively exhausted after a decade of producing licensed family-oriented titles for Children's Television Workshop, Hanna-Barbera, The Walt Disney Company, and others. Desiring to create original games the developers would want to play themselves, RSP founders Vince Desi and Mike Riedel established the Running with Scissors (RWS) label to produce mature titles under a different name. RSP was split into three development teams; one worked on a tie-in game for the 1993 film Free Willy, another worked on a product for an academic publisher, and the RWS team of seven people began development of a self-funded shooter game in March 1996. Inspired by the fast-paced shooting gameplay of the Robotron: 2084 (1982) cabinet playable in RSP's office, the game took on an isometric top-down perspective to differentiate it from various first-person shooters such as Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) that RWS felt were oversaturating the PC gaming market. RWS sought to make the game as outrageous as possible, conceiving it as a "murder simulator" featuring purely human enemies rather than aliens or zombies.

Early titles considered for the game were The Last Nail and The Postman Always Shoots Twice, a reference to the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice. Aware of the popularity of one-word video game titles such as Doom and Unreal, the team settled on Postal. The title was pitched by designer Steve Wik, who had read a comic book in which a character says "You're going postal!" The team later learned of the term's association with workplace violence committed by disgruntled postal workers in the United States, with Desi stating that "It was like a working title, an in-joke that we realized people were using in the real world. So it stuck."

RWS kept Postal's plot largely vague to focus on delivering immersive gameplay, leaving the details up to player interpretation. Art director Randy Briley gave the game a dark, brooding visual direction, creating hand-painted level backgrounds based on the historical mining town of Bisbee, Arizona. The player character, a gun-toting man designed by Briley, was intentionally given no backstory and obscured in shadows and filters in artwork to allow players to fully impose themselves onto the character. Realizing the character was nameless, Desi coined the "Postal Dude" moniker during an early interview. The protagonist's coat was originally black by default, but RWS discovered during playtesting that he was difficult to track onscreen in the dark levels and among other characters. To compensate, his default coat color was changed to red for the game's initial launch, much to the team's dissatisfaction. The comedic "demon" lines heard throughout gameplay were voiced by Tucson radio personality Rick Hunter.

Postal was developed with RSPiX, a cross-platform game engine developed by RSP and previously used in the company's licensed edutainment games. The game's soundtrack and audio effects were composed by Christian Salyer under his production studio, Sound Element.…

STORY

POSTAL casts the user as a nameless surrogate character that is brought to the breaking point when his newly purchased home in the small, desert community of Paradise, Arizona is repossessed due to a trivial error in the escrow filing. However, when he soon comes to believe that the repossession is merely the tip of a demonic conspiracy intended to dominate humanity, he truly goes "postal."