Postal is a 1997 isometrictop-down shooter game developed by Running with Scissors and published by Ripcord Games for Mac OS and Windows. Players assume the role of the "Postal Dude", a man who commits mass murder throughout the fictional town of Paradise, Arizona, to cure what he believes to be a "hate plague" released by the United States Air Force. The gameplay sees players killing a given percentage of armed hostiles in each level and being allowed to exit only after fulfilling the quota, as well as optionally killing unarmed civilians caught in the crossfire.
Running with Scissors (RWS), having previously developed 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 took on a third-person perspective to distinguish it from the growing first-person shooter market.
Postal received a mixed reception from critics for its short length and repetitive gameplay. The game sparked controversy for its realistic violence and gore upon release, and was subsequently banned in several countries. The United States Postal Service filed a lawsuit against RWS shortly after the game's announcement, lasting until its dismissal in 2003. An expansion, Special Delivery, released in August 1998. Postal would gain a cult following and become a franchise, with the sequel Postal 2 releasing in 2003. The game would receive ports to Linux, Mac OS X, Android, and Dreamcast. Postal's source code was released under the GNU GPL-2.0-only licence in December 2016, and the game became freeware in 2019.
A remake of the game, Postal Redux, was released for Windows on May 20, 2016, followed by Nintendo Switch in 2020 and PlayStation 4 in 2021.
The Postal Dude shooting at hostiles with the shotgun weapon. The top shows the amount of hostiles and population left, as well as the percentage of hostiles needed to be killed in the level.
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
A man referred to simply as the "Postal Dude" has been evicted from his home. He believes the United States Air Force is releasing an airborne agent upon his town of Paradise and that he is the only individual unaffected by the ensuing "hate plague". He fights his way from his house to an Air Force Base through various locations, including a ghetto, train station, trailer park, truck stop, and an ostrich farm. During the course of the gameplay, a voice in the protagonist's head (voiced by Rick Hunter) can be heard taunting his victims through cryptic absurdity, often through consecutive kills or when switching through the player's arsenal.
After raiding the Air Force Base, he is shown attempting to massacre an elementary school. Despite his best efforts, his weapons have no effect on the children. Suffering a mental breakdown amidst innocent laughter, he finds himself restrained in a mental asylum as hellish images cover the screen: A body bound to chains in a corridor, the protagonist in a straitjacket curled in the fetal position; a close-up of his face, covered in bindings; and the door to his cell numbered 593.
A disembodied voice, possibly a psychologist, gives a report on the protagonist's mental state. He suggests that the stress of urban life may have been the root cause of his rampage, prompting him to "go postal". The lack of any mentions of military interference with the civilian population implies that the Postal Dude's murders were the result of his own paranoid delusions. Amid distorted audio, the psychologist gives a final remark: "We may never know exactly what set him off, but rest assured we will have plenty of time to study him". Upon completion of the credits, manic cackling can be heard as the screen fades to black.
Due to the controversy surrounding the game's release, along with numerous American school shootings in the years following, the ending was changed in Postal Redux. The developers stated that they changed the ending because school shootings had lost the shock value they had when the original Postal released. Replacing the elementary school vision is the player witnessing the burial of an unknown person in a decaying field, widely believed to be his own funeral. Completion of the game on the hardest difficulty features the inclusion of an unknown male and female mourning over the grave as it descends. Both outcomes prompt a similar mental breakdown and an identical asylum cutscene, though consisting of animated shots over the original release's still image artwork.
History
Development
In the mid-1990s, Arizona-based work-for-hire game developer Riedel Software Productions (RSP), known for producing educational and child-friendly games based on Tom and Jerry, The Muppets, Sesame Street, and other popular franchises, was looking to deviate from its usual audience and produce games the developers themselves would want to play. RSP established a new label, Running with Scissors (RWS), to develop original, mature games under a separate name.[1][2][3] Self-funded with revenue procured from RSP's previous games, RWS began development of a shooter game in March 1996.[4] Inspired by the Robotron: 2084 (1982) cabinet that was playable in the RSP offices, the game was conceived as an isometrictop-down shooter to differentiate it from the various first-person shooters like Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) that were saturating the PC gaming market.[3][5][2] Titles considered for the game were The Last Nail and The Postman Always Shoots Twice, the latter being a reference to the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice. The Postman Always Shoots Twice was ultimately shortened to Postal, which became the game's final title.[6]
A sketch of the Postal Dude by art director Randy Briley, featured in the August 7, 1997 issue of The Wall Street Journal.
The player character, a nameless man, was intentionally left without a backstory and obscured in shadows and filters in artwork to allow players to fully impose themselves onto the character. The character's "Postal Dude" moniker was coined by RWS CEO Vince Desi in an early public interview. The Dude's coat was originally black, but RWS discovered during playesting that the Dude was difficult to track onscreen in the dark levels and among other characters. To compensate, the Dude's default coat color was changed to red, much to the team's dissatisfaction.[7] Later releases of the game restore the coat's original default black color. The Dude's pain sounds were voiced by Desi, while the comedic "demon" lines heard from the Dude's mind were voiced by radio personality Rick Hunter.[7]
Postal was first announced to the public in March 1997.[9] A public beta of Postal was released online on July 21, 1997, and was playable for a month before expiring in August.[10][11]
The full version of Postal released to retail in North America for Mac OS and Windows on September 24, 1997.[12][13] A censored version of the game was released in Europe by Take-Two Interactive,[14] removing the enemy execution feature, the marching band in the "Parade of Disasters" level, and the elementary school post-game sequence. Running with Scissors would release a European-only downloadable patch to restore the censored content.[15]
An add-on to the game titled Special Delivery released on August 27, 1998, featuring four new levels, new multiplayer features, and various new characters and voices.[16]
A Japanese version of Postal titled Super Postal (also known as Postal Power-Up Kit[a]) was released by MicroMouse on March 17, 2000, featuring Japanese voices and two exclusive levels, "Tokyo" and "Osaka".[17] Like the European release, this version of the game was censored, removing all blood and once again omitting the elementary school sequence.
Postal Plus, an edition of Postal that bundled both the original game and the Special Delivery add-on as one, released in May 2000. It was re-released in August 2003 as Postal: Classic and Uncut, with the addition of a demo for Postal 2.[18][19]
Postal was released digitally on GOG.com in April 2009[22][23] and later Steam in March 2013, followed by updates that improved compatibility with modern systems and introduced widescreen and modern controller support. Due to compatibility issues, the multiplayer and level editor features seen in the original release were removed.
An Android port of the game was released on April 10, 2015.[24]
In 2015, RWS announced that it would release the source code of the game "if someone promises to port it to the Dreamcast".[25] In June 2016, the developers gave the source code to a community developer who ported the game to the OpenPandorahandheld.[26][27] On December 28, 2016, the source code was released on Bitbucket under the GNU GPL-2.0-only license.[28] An anniversary update with community-contributed improvements was released in November 2017, restoring legacy game features like multiplayer via LAN and the two exclusive levels from the Super Postal release. The game became freeware in December 2019, and the source code was republished to GitHub in February 2024.[29][30]
On February 14, 2022, independent publisher Wave Game Studios announced a port of the game to the Dreamcast was to be released on June 2, officially licensed by Running with Scissors.[31]
NPD Techworld, a firm that tracked sales in the United States,[38] reported 49,036 units sold of Postal by December 2002.[39]
Next Generation reviewed the PC version of the game, rating it four stars out of five, and stated that "Overall, Postal is a title that breaks absolutely no new ground, but its tongue-in-cheek shooting action comes together to form a well-above-average shooter that adds to the genre."[35]
Postal received mixed reviews from critics. It holds a Metacritic score of 56/100.[32]GameSpot's Mark East gave the game a 6.6/10 score and commented: "The lack of longevity in the single-player mode and the simplistic multiplayer options make Postal a moderately fun ride, at best."[34] On regards to The Postal Dude's aggressive personality East comments on the Postal Dude's phrases from his diary, which indicate "something's not quite right in Postal Dude's noggin".[40]
In a retrospective, GamingOnLinux reviewer Hamish Paul Wilson gave the game 7/10, commenting that "there is no denying that Postal has some faults even when compared to some of the other games that were released around the same time as it, and time has definitely not been very kind to the title itself. But the concepts that the game explores, the ideas being expressed, and much of their actual implementations are just so interesting and compelling that one can still actually look past many of these faults and see the hidden gem that lies underneath."[41]
The reviewer from Pyramid #30 (March/April 1998) stated that "Many people have thought the premise for the game is sick. Well, it is. But, that's what makes it fun. There's no quest for secret, lost treasure. There's no time-clock ticking away as you try desperately to save the world. There's no alien spaceships or fantastical powers. There's just good old fashioned, psychotic violence - something that our mass media entertainment powers have been bringing us on prime time for years."[42]
Running with Scissors developed a remake of Postal, titled Postal Redux, using Unreal Engine 4. The project was announced as Postal: Redux in November 2014, then targeting a 2015 release for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.[43][44] In addition to these platforms, Running with Scissors announced Postal Redux as coming to PlayStation 4 in February 2016.[45] The Microsoft Windows version was released on May 20, 2016, while Linux, macOS, and PlayStation 4 versions were scheduled for a later release.[46] The PlayStation 4 version was canceled by June 2017, with Jaret Schachter of Running with Scissors blaming a lack of sales of the PC version.[47] MD Games ported Postal Redux to the Nintendo Switch, releasing it via the Nintendo eShop on October 16, 2020.[48] The PlayStation 4 version was later uncancelled and released on March 5, 2021.[49]
↑"News for March 21, 1997". Online Gaming Review. March 21, 1997. Archived from the original on February 10, 1998. Retrieved January 22, 2026. A new software development firm has formed, Running With Scissors. They announced their first title today, Postal, which is not about delivering mail, but mass-murder (from the colloquial phrase, "going postal").
↑"News for September 24, 1997". Online Gaming Review. September 24, 1997. Archived from the original on February 10, 1998. Retrieved September 11, 2024. Another big day for releases:... Postal and Forced Alliance from Ripcord... should all be found in stores today.
↑"Postal Downloads". Archived from the original on January 27, 1998. Retrieved January 21, 2026. Want the red blood and the execution back in your neutered version of Postal? This patch will do just that.
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