Video Game / Postal 1

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Postal is the first game of the eponymous series, developed by Running With Scissors and released on September 24, 1997 for PC and Mac. Unlike the rest of the series, which was played for Black Comedy and played at a first or third-person perspective, the first Postal was a very disturbing isometric shooter where you control Postal Dude as he goes around and shoots the residents of Paradise, Arizona, being consumed by a belief that the Air Force was releasing a hate plague.

It received an expansion pack in 1998 titled "Special Delivery", featuring four new levels, with a tonally different sequel being released five years later. In 2016, it received a remake in the form of Postal Redux, and the original version would be announced as freeware on 2019.

Let's trope something up:

• Adaptational Alternate Ending: While the confusing nature is kept, in Redux, the Dude doesn't try and fail to shoot up an elementary school, but instead finds a church with a funeral occuring, with the screen shaking and darkening as the casket lowers, leading into the original game's ending sequence. The loading screen on Hard and Nightmare mode lampshades this change.
  I've been here before. I know it. But... something's changed.
• All There in the Manual: There's no Backstory or anything in the game, save for the unsettling loading screens, nor a tutorial of any sort. The original game's manual and Hard and Nightmare mode in Postal Redux fills you in a bit, suggesting that a Hate Plague has infected the town, though it's hard to say for sure whether that's true. The intro to Postal III reveals that his house was foreclosed on, which caused the Dude to snap; even if that game is no longer canon, it was revealed to be a coma hallucination the Dude had between Apocalypse Weekend and Paradise Lost, so presumably a comment on the Dude's past from the Dude himself is still factual.
• Alternate Continuity: Redux is implied to be this with all the changes made from the original taken into account. Both Postal 1 and Redux are also heavily implied to be in a separate continuity than the one Postal 2 and 4 occur in.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Entering a new level will fully replenish your health, regardless of how much you lost during the previous level.
  • Grabbing a health or ammo pickup when you're already close to the maximum will leave the pickup with whatever health or ammo you didn't need, so you can come back to it later and not have to worry that you're wasting resources if you end up picking up health when you're already one or two points away from fully healed.
  • In the original game, you couldn't move and use the shotgun at the same time, leaving you open to enemy attacks while trying to kill a hostile. Redux allows you to run and use the shotgun at the same time with no issues.
  • Grenades, firebombs and mines are treated as primary weapons in the original, meaning you had to manually use them like any other weapon. Redux treats them as secondary weapons, as they now can be used with a dedicated secondary fire button.
  • Hostile health is now displayed with a crosshair in Redux. Not only that, but enemies are easier to kill than the original.
• Artificial Stupidity: Every panicking unarmed civilian will run around in absolutely random directions. They will not try to actually run away from the heavily armed lunatic, nor will they try to steer clear from crossfire.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: The Postal Dude can kill the ostriches in The Farm level if he desires to.
• Beating a Dead Player: Enemies still attack the corpse for a few moments after the player is killed. The player's corpse can be repeatedly tossed by enemy's explosives.
• Bedlam House: The Postal Dude is confined to one of these in the ending, though given the degree of his insanity, it's hard to tell to what degree this is real.
• Body Horror: The credits screen that appears every time you quit.
• Bottomless Magazines: The Dude's Starter Weapon, the SMG, has infinite ammo. The other weapons have limited ammo capacity but aside from the rocket launcher and napalm launcher, do not need to be reloaded.
• The Cameo: A cheat code in Redux unlocks Not Important/The Antagonist from Hatred as a playable character, complete with his own voice lines.
• Developer's Foresight: The game will notify you if you manage to complete a level without killing any innocents. It will keep track of innocents who get caught in the crossfire and killed by enemies, and those will not be counted against the player.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Unlike the games after, the events of the first Postal aren't Played for Laughs in the slightest (other than some Bond One-Liners from the Postal Dude), and are instead played for all the horror you'd expect from a guy snapping and going on a killing spree.
  • This game is a top-down shooter rather than the first- and third-person shooters the rest of the series has been.
  • There are no melee weapons available to use, being limited to ranged weapons and throwables. You also cannot piss.
  • There are no characters based off real people, either played by themselves (Mike J and Vince Desi, Gary Coleman, Jennifer Walcott, Civvie), or parodies (Osama bin Laden).
  • The final level of the original game straight up has children present, which the Postal Dude fails to harm. Later games omit children altogether for obvious reasons.
  • It's implied that Rick Hunter's lines for the Dude aren't actually the Dude's, but rather a demon or a split personality, indicated by the voice lines in the files being labeled as "demon". All future games, including Redux, establish that Rick Hunter's performance really is the Postal Dude's voice.
• Evil Laugh: The Dude may randomly break out in one of these when shooting people. In The Stinger, his laugh can also be heard.
• Exploding Barrels: Played straight, and also used somewhat creatively to simulate other explosive environmental objects like gas pumps.
• Impairment Shot: Done in the ending. In the original game, after attempting to shoot the children, the Postal Dude falls to the ground, and the image doubles and swirls around before merging back into a single image. In Redux, the ending is of a coffin lowering into the ground, at which point when the Dude collapses the image merely blurs.
• Improbable Infant Survival: Played with. The final level in the original game is called "The Elementary School", but it's all scripted. The Dude shows up and opens fire on a playground, but the children aren't affected. Then he has his breakdown. On the other hand, the kids from that level seem to be the same shorter sprites you can kill during the game, so who knows?
• Man on Fire: Setting people on fire causes them to run in every direction, and can start a chain reaction if they touch other people. Of course, if they touch you, you also get torched and flail around.
• Mind Screw:
  • The loading screens, despite nothing really supernatural happening in game. They largely consist of revelry in the carnage taking place using flowery language and phrases whose meaning is impossible to discern (for example, the very first one says "The Earth is hungry. Its heart throbs and demand cleansing. The Earth is also thirsty..."). What complicates matters is that in the manual, or on Hard mode and above in Redux, the entries are entirely different, writing about a supposed Hate Plague that's swept across the entire town, and for the most part are written in a much more grounded style. Which of these are the Postal Dude's real thoughts and beliefs are not expanded upon. Justified in that the protagonist had gone insane.
  • Both the original and the Redux endings can count as this. The original ending has the Dude attempting to shoot up an elementary school, finding out that his guns do nothing, and collapsing as the screen distorts. The Redux ending has him trying to kill one "hostile" in a church, coming across a funeral that may or may not be his own and collapsing to the ground as the casket is lowered and the "hostile" tally is fulfilled. Both end the same way, with the Dude incarcerated into an asylum to be studied.
  • Redux's Co-Op ending is even worse. It implies that there's more than one Postal Dude, with the Co-Op Dudes arriving at the Campaign/Rampage Dude's cell to finish him.
  • Hell, Postal 1 as a whole could be considered one due to how out-of-place it feels next to every other game in the series.
• Multiple Endings: Redux actually has six endings, each one with their own minor differences. One for beating the game normally, one for beating Rampage Mode, one for beating the game on Hard/Nightmare Mode (which changes the loading screen messages to the journal entries from the original game's manual, as well), one for beating either the Super Delivery (Special Delivery and Super Postal levels) or Excess Postage (base game levels + Super Delivery levels) campaigns, and one for beating the game in Co-Op.
• Murder Simulators: The game seems dangerously close to one, at times.
• Naked People Are Funny: Some of the elderly people in the level La Palamino Resort are running around buck naked.
• Oddball in the Series: A rare example that applies to the first installment no less. Compared to every other game using Black Comedy, this game takes the idea of a man Going Postal completely straight with little to no comedy. It's also an isometric shooter compared to the later games' first/third person perspectives.
• Scare Chord: A subtle one can be heard when preforming an execution.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the buildings in the Carnival level in Redux sports a green poster advertising JoJo the Idiot Circus Boy.
  • Perhaps unintentionally, but the Postal Dude's explanation for his rampage in the manual (later given in-game in Hard Mode in Redux) about him fighting a town whose inhabitants have been turned into homicidal maniacs by a Hate Plague that the government created and infected the town with from a local Air Force base, with the government now trying to contain the outbreak, is an awful lot like the plot of The Crazies and its 2010 remake.
  • In the Mine, you can find a skeleton with its pelvis shattered leaning against a wall.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: The loading screens are far more twisted and insane then anything that's happening during the actual gameplay, bar a few of them that simply consist of bullet ridden bodies. Additionally, both the ending of the original game and Redux are trippy and may not actually be happening. In the former, the Dude attempts to gun down a crowd of children at a school, but the bullets and rockets don't hit them and he passes out. In the latter, he comes across a funeral in progress, and watches the coffin get lowered into the ground, unable to shoot the priest, and also passes out. In both cases this culminates in him being committed to an asylum, where it's heavily implied that the entire game was the Dude having a psychotic break and going on a killing spree, with any justification merely being a delusion.
• Title Drop: One of the Dude's taunts is simply "Postal!".
• Unreliable Narrator: The Postal Dude's Diary/War Journal in the manual or on Hard Mode and above in Redux has him write down that everyone in the town is infected with some sort of Hate Plague and that he's the only one uninfected or immune. This is despite the fact that there are non-hostile NPCs wandering around every level and all the murderous intent by the hostiles is directed only at the Dude, not each other or to non-hostiles. Given that he ends up committed to an institution in the ending, the obvious implication is that he's been deluding himself the entire time.
• Updated Re-release:
  • The original game was rereleased on Steam in 2015 with support for modern hardware, improved mouse and keyboard controls, gamepad compatibility, achievements, high resolution settings, widescreen support and all levels from the "Special Delivery" expansion pack. And to celebreate the series 20th anniversary in 2017, Running With Scissors released a patch including the two Japan-exclusive levels from "Super Postal" worldwide for the first time since its release. Unfortunately, online multiplayer and the level editor were removed from this version.
  • Redux includes new character models for the Dude, civilians and hostiles, redone artwork for the levels, loading screens and the ending, new endings, redone soundtrack, new and redone voicework, a new level (The Carnival), a new weapon (the revolver), new skins, Not Important/The Antagonist from Hatred as a playable character, QOL improvements, rebalanced difficulty and a new Score Attack mode known as "Rampage Mode". Later updates for the remake included levels from both expansions, online co-op and a deathmatch mode.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • The final level of the original game has the Dude undergo one of these upon opening fire on a playground full of children and finding that they are completely impervious to his weapons.
  • The final level in Redux, "The End", has the Dude heading to church, finding it's locked and empty, then moving straight into a funeral, presumably his own (as the hostile count is a measly 1, and it's reduced to 0 when the coffin is lowered), before he has his breakdown.
• Villain Protagonist: It is, after all, a game about committing a mass shooting. Even if the player only attacks NPCs listed as hostile, the Dude still ends up in an asylum at the end, with the narration suggesting he was insane the entire time.
• Would Hurt a Child: Averted hard in both the original game and Redux. Lead designer and co-creator of RWS Vince Desi has made it clear that for all the things he's okay with a player being able to do in videogames, murdering children is effectively the one line he refuses to ever cross. In fact this is part of what caused the game to become so controversial because at the time the New York Times wrote an article saying you CAN kill the children, and when Vince called them up over it and they were so nonchalant about the lie told and their refusal to print a correction, he sorta implied he was going to go over there and bash the writer's face in, which got him a call from the FBI.