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Running With Scissors insists that the actions depicted should not be reenacted in Real Life.
"I Regret Nothing."
The Postal Dude

Before Uwe Boll brought us 2007's Postal, there was the Postal video game series, developed by Running With Scissors, which started with 1997's Postal. The game puts you in the shoes of "The Postal Dude", who believes himself the Only Sane Man in a world gone mad (he's not). As such, he goes on a bloody rampage, shooting it out with cops, soldiers, and innocent bystanders alike.

The game spawned three sequels: Postal 2 (2003), Postal III (2011), and Postal 4: No Regerts (2019). It also spawned the aforementioned loose film adaptation in 2007 by Uwe Boll.

On 20 May 2016, RWS released POSTAL Redux, an HD remake of the original Postal, on Steam, and later open sourced the original version of Postal 1. Four years later, it was ported to the Nintendo Switch on October 16th 2020, making it the first time the Postal series has appeared on a console. It then received a Play Station 4 port in March 2021.

Another spin-off known as Postal: Brain Damaged, developed by Hyperstrange and supervised by Running With Scissors, was announced on 5 September, 2020 at Realms Deep, and released in June 9th, 2022 for PC, with console versions in the works. Unlike the other games in the series, Brain Damaged is a Retraux shooter that harkens back to the violent first person shooters of The '90s, such as Doom and Wolfenstein 3-D, with an atmosphere reminiscent of the original game's. Watch the announcement trailer here.

On April Fools 2023, RWS released Poostall Royale, a free to play twin stick shooter and a wackier throwback to the first game. It also marks the debut of the Postal Doe, the Postal Dude's female counterpart.

Not to be confused with Portal, although a 2016 update for the second game, which promises of a store which will open in 2016 (in-universe), pokes fun of it in the newly opened "STEME Store". See also Hatred, the Spiritual Licensee of these games.

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    Series-wide Tropes 
  • Artificial Stupidity: Taken to absurd levels in the third installment. Enemies won't shoot you even if you're right in front of them or sometimes they will completely ignore your existence even while you're attacking them. And friendly AI also have problems with pathfinding and following you, making escort missions even more frustrating than they already could be.
  • Badass Longcoat: The Postal Dude's attire of choice, with Cool Shades and, in the third game, fingerless gloves.
  • Black Comedy: While the first game was far more gritty and took itself more seriously, the later games moved into this territory and reveled in it without ever looking back.
  • Bloody Hilarious: Hell yeah.
  • Catchphrase: I Regret Nothing.
  • Crapsack World: No normal person would want to live in Paradise. The police are corrupt, and all the townspeople appear to be idiots and/or straight-up psychopaths.
    • It's worse in Catharsis, as the global economic meltdown has shot gas prices through the roof. The place is a border town and houses the G.W. Bush memorial border fence, which is used to keep Americans from illegally entering Mexico to look for jobs instead of the other way around. Any "illegals" crossing from Mexico are nothing but Al Qaeda wearing piss-poor disguises.
  • Creator Provincialism: 2, III, and 4: No Regerts are all set in fictional areas in Arizona. Running with Scissors was founded in Tucson AZ and continues to operate there.
  • Deadpan Snarker: The Dude.
  • Deconstruction: All of the games in the franchise can be deconstructions of the "Murder Simulator" genre and of it's own games- Postal 1 looking like an absolutely serious and downright chilling examination of the mind of a spree killer and what it would be like being as mentally ill as him (Hint: Not fun) as a deconstruction of Postal 2 and III, while 2 and III, in turn, are completely silly and ludicrous deconstructions of Postal 1 by mocking the edgy approach to these games and playing the atrocities off as giggle-worthy.
  • Denser and Wackier: The first game was played relatively straight, whereas the games from 2 onward are basically the video game equivalent to South Park.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: Though in the second and third games, it depends on the player's actions. Still, the difference between "everything" and "damn near everything" is academic here.
  • Excuse Plot:
    • Everyone is your enemy and you want to kill them all because... well, that bit was excised so it wouldn't get in the way so much. You're probably just deranged.
    • In the sequel, you do your chores, mostly by killing anyone who denies you the objective. Or you can just watch the world fall apart around you.
    • In Paradise Lost, you come out of a radiation coma after 11 years, only to find that Champ has vanished completely. Now you have to find him.
    • Postal III is really just about the Dude trying to escape Catharsis, as it's not much better than Paradise.
  • Fat Bitch: The Dude's wife, at least in the movie. In both it and the second game, she's simply known as "The Bitch". According to Paradise Lost, she was indeed this before her dating Mad Cow Mike J made her thin. After the boss fight, Mike J revives her with his milk, turning her fat again.
  • For the Lulz and For the Evulz: Of course, it depends on how amoral you want to be. In the second game, it is entirely possible to do a Pacifist Run and complete the game.
  • Genre Shift: Not for the games, but for the developer. Prior to Postal, these people made such games as Tom & Jerry and Bobby's World for the SNES, amongst other titles largely aimed at children. They also made the well-known Spy VS Spy game. Why'd they shift over? They basically got tired of making licensed games and wanted to do their own stuff.
  • Going Postal: Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Guide Dang It!: In the first game, many players clearly had trouble figuring out that pressing F1 was how you moved on to the next level after you completed all objectives, given that the Steam version has an achievement called "Oh, you press F1!" for reaching the second level.
  • Heroic Comedic Sociopath: The Postal Dude, when killing terrorists and zombies. The Dude can actually embrace the "Heroic" part in Postal III, where he can become a cop and use non-lethal force to take down bad guys.
  • Molotov Cocktail: Available in every game to date.
  • Moral Guardians: The series attracted the attention of them in real life, while the games themselves mock them, by portraying them as hypocritically violent protesters.
  • Negative Continuity: While there is some semblance of continuity in the games, details tend to change not only from game to game but even mission to mission; it's fully possible for Gary Coleman and Krotchy to die in Postal 2 only to turn up alive and well in prison on Friday . Sometimes the Dude will actively acknowledge the inconsistencies in continuity, such as trying to ask Mike J. why he's human again in 4 when in 2, he became Mad Cow Mike J., a demonic cow monster.
  • Press X to Die: Played literally. In Postal 1, the player can press "Q" to commit suicide by gunshot. Postal 2 allows you to press "G" do the same, but by biting a hand-grenade, which doubles as a Suicide Attack. This was removed from Postal III and Paradise Lost, though the former nods to it in the form of the "Emo" achievement, for injuring yourself.
  • Refuge in Audacity: The series completely runs on it.
  • Soundtrack Cover Character Jam: Several.
    • The Postal & Postal 2 Original Soundtrack features four skeletons dressed like a marching band.
    • The soundtrack for Redux features a Humanoid Abomination getting his cranium blown out while listening to something on headphones, in the game's deranged art style.
    • Music To Go Postal By Vol. 2 has The Dude holding a pair of scissors with a boombox on his back in the style of 4.
    • The original soundtrack for 4 has The Dude with a pair of headphones on fire.
  • The Sociopath: The Postal Dude. Of course, that depends on the player's choices.
  • Through the Eyes of Madness: The Dude remarks on it in Apocalypse Weekend during an early hallucination sequence, noting after killing what appears to be a demon with the voice and features of Gary Coleman that "With my luck, that's really a nun, or someone's grandmother. But there's no sense in taking chances."
  • Videogame Cruelty Potential: The whole point of the series.
    • In the first two games, the player can encounter a marching band that will inevitably be lit on fire or blown up.
    • In Postal 2, it's possible to shoot a character, light him on fire, piss on him to put the fire out, kick him to death while he is crawling on the ground, then whack the charred corpse's head off with a shovel for good measure - ideally in the direction of another NPC to make them panic.
  • Villain Protagonist: Though frankly, most characters he meets aren't much better.
  • Vulgar Humor: From pissing on anything you come across to ribald sexual references to wearing an ass-less gimp suit, the series love to cash in the shock value to players.
  • Wide-Open Sandbox: The second and third games to varying degrees. The first game, and the second game's first expansion are linear, level-based games, but some levels are fairly open in design and allow for at least some exploration (particularly the "Lower Paradise" area of Apocalypse Weekend). Postal III eventually had a Free Roam mode patched in.
  • World of Jerkass: Pretty much everyone The Dude meets ranges from "jerk" to "attempting to murder you and everyone else", so it's not too surprising that he has the attitude to match.

    Postal and Postal Redux 

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  • 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.
  • 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 manual and Hard 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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: 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.
  • Body Horror: The credits screen that appears every time you quit.
  • 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 establish that Rick Hunter's performance really is the Postal Dude's voice.
  • Exploding Barrels: Played straight, and also used somewhat creatively to simulate other explosive environmental objects like gas pumps.
  • 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?
  • Mind Screw:
    • The loading screens, despite nothing really supernatural happening in game. 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.
  • Revolvers Are Just Better: Redux introduces a revolver that's very powerful.
  • 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
  • Title Drop: One of the Dude's taunts is simply "Postal!".
  • 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.
  • 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.

 
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Postal

Parodied in the Postal film adaptation: the interview process for one Incompetence, Inc. involves ever more surreal and nonsensical questions, asked by a hostile stenographer who doesn't even bother to wait for answers, until the Postal Guy snaps entirely. His outburst gets him to the top of the list.

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