Postal (video game)

**Postal** is a 1997 isometric shoot 'em up developed by Running with Scissors and published by Ripcord Games. The player controls an unnamed, gun-wielding man (often called the "Postal Dude") who carries out a mass murder spree in the town of Paradise, Arizona, under unclear circumstances. In each level, the player must kill a required percentage of police, military, and other armed "hostiles" to proceed, and may also choose to slaughter unarmed civilians caught in the chaos.

Running with Scissors (RWS) had previously made licensed children's games as Riedel Software Productions (RSP) and wanted to make Postal as shocking as possible. Taking inspiration from the 1982 game *Robotron: 2084* and the phrase "going postal," the developers used isometric and top-down views to set it apart from the flood of first-person shooters at the time.

Released for Mac OS and Windows in September 1997, Postal got mixed reviews from critics, who pointed out its short length, awkward controls, and repetitive gameplay. The game sparked controversy for its violence and gore, leading to bans in several stores and countries. The United States Postal Service sued RWS for trademark infringement before the game came out; the case was dismissed in 2003. An add-on called *Special Delivery* was released in 1998. Despite the mixed reception, Postal gained a cult following and became a franchise, with the direct sequel *Postal 2* arriving in 2003. After its original release, the game was ported to Linux, Mac OS X, Android, and Dreamcast. The source code was released under the GNU GPL-2.0-only license in 2016, and the game became freeware in 2019. A remake, *Postal Redux*, came out 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 tied to the direction the player character (the "Postal Dude") is facing, so players must constantly keep track of his orientation, which can be tricky on the isometric maps. There are eight weapon slots, each with a fixed maximum ammo capacity. The default weapon is a weak machine gun with unlimited ammo. Although it has no practical use, players can hide their weapons by pressing the tilde key.

**Plot**

In the fictional Arizona town of Paradise, an unidentified man (commonly called the "Postal Dude" or "Postal Guy") gets into an armed confrontation with residents and law enforcement outside his home. Diary entries in the game's manual reveal he was recently evicted and believes he is the only person not affected by a supposed "sickness" causing violent behavior in the town. Thinking the illness is linked to the local air force base, he goes on a deadly journey through Paradise, fighting through a ghetto, train station, ostrich farm, and other locations to reach the base. The game hints that the protagonist is haunted by a demonic presence; level intermission screens show text describing sadistic violence, and a hallucinatory voice (voiced by Rick Hunter) absurdly taunts victims during gameplay.

After raiding the air force base, the protagonist is shown trying 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. Following this, hellish images of bondage and confinement inside an asylum appear while an unknown voice gives a report on the protagonist's mental state and motive. During the voice's closing remarks, a tortured scream is heard as the screen rests on a bolted-shut cell door in darkness.

In the *Postal Redux* remake, the elementary school scene is replaced with a new ending where the player witnesses the burial of an unknown person in a decaying field. Completing the game on the hardest difficulty shows an unknown man and woman mourning over the grave as it descends. Both outcomes lead to a similar collapse of the protagonist and an identical asylum cutscene, now with animated shots instead of the original's still images.

**Development**

By the mid-1990s, Arizona-based work-for-hire developer Riedel Software Productions (RSP) had grown creatively exhausted after a decade of making licensed family games for Children's Television Workshop, Hanna-Barbera, The Walt Disney Company, and others. Wanting to create original games the developers would enjoy themselves, RSP founders Vince Desi and Mike Riedel created the Running with Scissors (RWS) label to produce mature titles under a different name. RSP split into three teams: one worked on a tie-in for the 1993 film *Free Willy*, another on a product for an academic publisher, and the RWS team of seven people began developing a self-funded shooter in March 1996. Inspired by the fast-paced shooting of the *Robotron: 2084* (1982) arcade cabinet in RSP's office, the game used an isometric top-down perspective to stand out from first-person shooters like *Doom* (1993) and *Quake* (1996), which RWS felt were flooding the PC market. RWS aimed to make the game as outrageous as possible, conceiving it as a "murder simulator" with only human enemies, not aliens or zombies.