Trivia / Postal 2

• Ascended Fanfic: Certain re-releases of Postal 2 and its expansion have included A Week in Paradise, as well as another mod, Eternal Damnation. The Steam release eventually patched in A Week in Paradise as a campaign option, with the features of Apocalypse Weekend merged with the main game, and has since included multiple weapons from Eternal Damnation, as well as adding Workshop support to re-add the M@d Mods weapons from later AWP versions, among many other mods.
• Banned in China: Postal 2 remains banned in New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia^note Physical copies only, one can still buy the game off Steam, France and Germany^note Despite the fact that all of the Postal games are banned in Germany, the film was still a German production and was directed by a German director. The game was also once banned in Sweden, though this has since been overturned.
  • Downplayed in Japan, where the game is still allowed to be sold (and was even one of the only countries to get the Russian-developed expansion Corkscrew Rules!), but not only is it restricted from being sold to minors and publicly displayed in shops, it is also considered an Eroge in Japan for its extreme Gorn, despite having little to no pornographic content.
• B-Team Sequel: Not the base game, but the semi-official expansion pack Corkscrew RuLes! was developed by Russian developers Avalon Style Entertainment and Akella for the Russian market.
• Completely Different Title: The expansion Corkscrew RuLes! was retitled as ロシアより愛をこめて (Roshia Yori Ai wo Komete, From Russia with Love) for its Japanese release, to denote that the expansion was made in Russia.
• Dummied Out: A model of Kamek◊, based off the Magikoopa's appearances from Super Mario World and Super Mario World (1991) is in the game's files.
• Fan Translation:
  • Despite the game getting an official Russian translation from Akella, the modern release of the game on Steam has a fan translation to translate all the new content added in the updated version (including the new expansion Paradise Lost), as the vanilla release's Russian option is incomplete with post-Steam content not being dubbed. The original Akella release (which RWS ported the script of which over unaltered) also had numerous errors and inconsistencies. The fan translation would fix any translation errors that Akella may have made, while keeping the integrity intact and also translating all in-game textures to Russian, as the original release only translated some textures, leaving some Funny Background Events untranslated.
  • One was made to translate the Russian-made Corkscrew RuLes! to English, with either the original Russian audio or the English dub from the Japanese release as audio options. Strangely, the subtitles, due to being made before the discovery of the Japanese version, have a very different script from the English dub. This means the subtitles are not mere dubtitles, but it can be slightly confusing when playing with both the English dub and subtitles. Another weird thing is that the English dub is truer to the original Russian script, with the subtitles having more changes to fit the rest of the Postal games.
  • Similar to the Russian translation above, an official Polish release did exist, but there is no Polish translation on Steam. The translation was ported over to Steam by fans while also translating all the new content (including Paradise Lost to Polish. Unlike the Russian translation, however, all new voice recordings done for the Steam release are left in English, leaving the dub unfinished.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: It is now very hard to find official copies of Corkscrew RuLes!, as it only came out in Russia and Japan. Akella, the Russian publisher, has gone out of business, and Japanese copies of the game are notoriously hard to come across due to the game being considered pornographic in Japan due to extreme violence. A free port of the expansion in the form of a mod for the Steam Updated Re-release of the game was made, one that fixed many of the bigger technical issues, and even had an English Fan Translation synced up to either the Russian audio or the English dub made for the Japanese release. The expansion would finally see an official rerelease on the Zoom Platform in 2021. Albeit one that was unmodified from the original releases, and was only in either Russian or English dubbed with Japanese subtitles and Russian text.
• Late Export for You: The Russian-developed expansion pack Corkscrew RuLes! was only ever released in Russia and Japan. Until its worldwide rerelease on the Zoom Platform in 2021, which was the first time the expansion pack saw a release outside of Russia and Japan.
• Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: The English dub of the Russian expansion Corkscrew RuLes! had the Russian voice cast redubbing themselves to English.
• No Dub for You: Only the base game of Postal 2 was dubbed in Japanese, with the expansion packs being in English with Japanese subtitles. Oddly, this even extends to the Russian-made Corkscrew RuLes!, which had an English dub exclusively for the Japanese release.
• Posthumous Credit: Gary Coleman returns in the Paradise Lost expansion, released in 2015. The actor himself passed away in 2010, so all his lines are ones that had already been recorded for the original game and its first expansion, and actual plot dialogue is delivered by a different character, the "exceptionally tall midget" Big McWillis.
• Role Reprise: Jim Halstead voices Uncle Dave again in Paradise Lost, after III made him an individual character beyond an NPC with a unique look like he was in base Postal 2.
• Sequel Gap: Paradise Lost, an Expansion Pack for the digital releases of the game, was released in April 2015, almost 11 years after Apocalypse Weekend, which released in August 2004.
• Tribute to Fido: Champ is named for lead designer Vince Desi's dog, who later died of cancer in 2011. The 2015 Expansion Pack Paradise Lost, whose plot involves searching for him, is dedicated to his memory.
• Vaporware: Paradise Lost was announced in mid-2014 and was slated for a fall release that same year. It was then delayed to an unspecified date, finally being released on April 17th, 2015.
• What Could Have Been: Postal 2 had some things that were either cut from the game or scrapped. Of course since the game is medium aware, it has a graveyard for them. A list of these things are:
  • A meat gun, brought back in the A Week In Paradise mod.
  • A staple gun, also brought back in AWP.
  • A rebar gun.
  • Fire seeking cats.
  • Fetuses with guns, though the idea is recycled for the monkeys from Paradise Lost.
  • Rape clowns.
  • "Teen sniper". The name of an arcade machine in the game, possibly a planned mini-game or an enemy. This too was brought back in AWP.
  • Pigeons. Referenced twice over, with the Pigeon Mission (that the game skips over entirely due to "no budget" for it) in Apocalypse Weekend, and a fake DLC pack for Paradise Lost that promises to re-add it.
  • The Dude's father as a zombie, to quote the grave: "Zombie Dad". Yet another thing brought back in AWP.
  • And last but not least: The game's original plot, before it became what it is today.
  • The Postal Dude was thinner and looked different than in the retail version.◊ This model can be brought back through a mod and also used as a ragdoll for Garry's Mod.
  • Several weapons, while functionally identical to those in the released game, had very different models before the game's release, such as the pistol being modeled after the Colt 1911 before settling on the Desert Eagle, the shotgun being a rusty SPAS-12 rather than a Remington 870, or the M16 appearing with all sorts of extra attachments (and sounding like a chaingun). The original shotgun would later make its way into Eternal Damnation, and in turn was rolled back into the main game with post-Steam release updates as the "Beta Shotgun", a separate weapon which has to be reloaded after six shells but is noticeably more powerful than the basic shotgun.
  • The layout of Paradise seemed to have been mostly finalized by the time of the alpha in 2002, but one major change was the starting point - the Postal Dude apparently lived in an actual house that happened to have a trailer near it, rather than living in the trailer itself. A look at the map from the E3 2002 presentation also shows some of the areas were at least moved around, notably the RWS offices being in the south-central portion of the map rather than near the northeast corner.
  • Befitting the game's tone, when it was updated in 2013 to add achievements, there were supposed to be 69 in all. However, only 68 actually shipped with the update, as the 69th - which would have been unlocked for playing the game on Linux - didn't work properly for some reason.
  • The Claptrap parody XJ-2 "Pisstrap" robots in Paradise Lost were meant to go a step further and actually have David Eddings record the voice for them. Mike J on a livestream mentioned that although Eddings was enthusiastic, he was forced to drop the role as Randy Pitchford had found out and threatened to blacklist him if he took the part. Eddings left Gearbox sometime in 2019, which allowed him to take part in Postal 4 as Joe Bellow, and then properly voice the XJ-2 robots with the game's 20th Anniversary update.
  • Some have speculated that the Russian expansion Corkscrew RuLes! was meant to get an international release, with the English dub on the Japanese version being proof of this. Despite this, the expansion only ever saw a release in Russia and Japan until 2021.