Postal Redux

Postal is a shooter with isometric projection. 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.

In the fictional Arizona town of Paradise, an unidentified man (commonly referred to as the "Postal Dude" or "Postal Guy") enters an armed confrontation with fellow residents and law enforcement outside his home. Diary entries provided in the game's instruction manual reveal that the man is a recent evictee, believing himself to be the only individual unaffected by an alleged "sickness" causing violent behavior among the town's population. Theorizing a connection between the illness and the local air force base, he embarks on a lethal journey across Paradise, fighting his way through a ghetto, train station, ostrich farm, and other locales to reach the base. It is implied that the protagonist is being tormented by a demonic presence; the level intermission screens feature text detailing sadistic violence, and a hallucinatory voice (voiced by Rick Hunter) can be heard absurdly taunting victims throughout gameplay.

After raiding the air force base, the protagonist is shown attempting 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. After the elementary school scene, hellish images of bondage and confinement inside an asylum are displayed while an unknown voice gives a report on the protagonist's mental state and motive for his rampage. During the voice's closing remarks, a tortured scream can be heard as the screen rests on a bolted-shut cell door cloaked in darkness.

By the mid-1990s, Arizona-based work for hire game developer Riedel Software Productions (RSP) had grown creatively exhausted after a decade of producing licensed family-oriented titles for Children's Television Workshop, Hanna-Barbera, The Walt Disney Company, and others. Desiring to create original games the developers would want to play themselves, RSP founders Vince Desi and Mike Riedel established the Running with Scissors (RWS) label to produce mature titles under a different name. RSP was split into three development teams; one worked on a tie-in game for the 1993 film Free Willy, another worked on a product for an academic publisher, and the RWS team of seven people began development of a self-funded shooter game in March 1996. Inspired by the fast-paced shooting gameplay of the Robotron: 2084 (1982) cabinet playable in RSP's office, the game took on an isometric top-down perspective to differentiate it from various first-person shooters such as Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) that RWS felt were oversaturating the PC gaming market. RWS sought to make the game as outrageous as possible, conceiving it as a "murder simulator" featuring purely human enemies rather than aliens or zombies.

Early titles considered for the game were The Last Nail and The Postman Always Shoots Twice, a reference to the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice. Aware of the popularity of one-word video game titles such as Doom and Unreal, the team settled on Postal. The title was pitched by designer Steve Wik, who had read a comic book in which a character says "You're going postal!" The team later learned of the term's association with workplace violence committed by disgruntled postal workers in the United States, with Desi stating that "It was like a working title, an in-joke that we realized people were using in the real world. So it stuck."

NPD Techworld, a firm that tracked sales in the United States, reported 49,036 units sold of Postal by December 2002.

Postal received mixed reviews from critics. It holds a Metacritic score of 56/100. 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." 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".

A sequel to the game, Postal 2, was released in 2003. Director Uwe Boll bought the movie rights for the series and produced a film of the same name. Two additional sequels, Postal III and Postal 4: No Regerts, were released in 2011 and 2022, respectively.

Running with Scissors developed a remake of Postal, titled Postal Redux, using Unreal Engine 4. The project was announced in November 2014, initially targeting a 2015 release for Linux, macOS, and Windows. In addition to these platforms, Running with Scissors announced that Postal Redux was also coming to the PlayStation 4 in February 2016. The Windows version was released on May 20, 2016, while Linux, macOS, and PlayStation 4 versions were scheduled for a later release.