Anyone who knows me knows I’ve got a few core beliefs.
Digital privacy is a human right, You shouldn’t be forced to go on a diet, Open source is the best kind of software and the best franchise is the iconic Postal franchise.
I got into Postal in late high school and there was no fucking stopping the train after that. I played Postal 2, Postal 2’s DLC, I tried to play Postal 3, I got a free copy of Postal 4 on PS5, Postal 1 on the Sega Dreamcast (yes, I know that’s random as hell, don’t question me), and I’ve played Postal: Brain Damaged more than I care to admit.
So today I’m kicking off a series of articles about my personal history with the Postal franchise.
Hell, I even owned like three copies of the Postal movie: on DVD, on 4K Blu-ray, and even digitally on Steam. Yes, at one point Steam let you buy movies. Most people had no idea, which is probably why the whole thing got quietly killed off in 2019.
Where was I? Oh right—talking about my history with Postal so I have a starting point for this article series.
I got so deep into the fandom that somehow I ended up with Vince Desi, the co-founder of Running With Scissors, in my phone’s contact list. To this day I’m still not entirely sure how the hell I pulled that off.
My first title was Postal 2. I was that one dork in high school who refused to use Windows—my, how things haven’t changed in all those years. I was very limited in what games I could play on Linux, but fret not: Postal 2 came to Linux in 2005, only two years after Windows and a year after Mac OS. You only needed 128 MB of RAM, 1.4 GB of storage, and a whopping 64 MB of video memory.
Yeah, I was able to run it on a tiny ThinkPad when I first got into the game in high school, and I eventually got to play the Apocalypse Weekend expansion when I picked up the “Fudge Packed” edition, which carried this glowing review:
“Until someone boxes up syphilis… Postal 2 is the worst product ever.” – Robert Coffey (Computer Gaming World)
Truly the finest compliment a game like this could ever ask for.
Now, Postal was so over the top it got banned in multiple countries, including Malaysia, Australia, Germany, New Zealand, and Sweden.
What the hell is with Malaysia banning all the good shit? First it bans Postal, then it bans Repo! The Genetic Opera. Like, save some fun for the rest of us.
Thankfully, the Postal 2 ban eventually got overturned in Australia, because without Postal… well, remember the old quote “No TV and no beer make Homer something something.” from Simpsons parody of the Shining aka The Shinning
Yeah. We don’t want the future version of me, freshly relocated to the land down under, going:
“No Postal, no goth music… make The Professor… something… something.”
I got so deep into the Postal 2 fandom that I started making custom maps. Unreal Engine 2 ended up being the second engine I ever learned to map for—right after the Half-Life 2 Source engine, which I was already abusing to make my own bootleg Portal mazes.
I even made the Postal 2 map/loading music my cellphone ringtone. That’s how far down the rabbit hole I went.
If you scroll back on my Instagram, one of the first posts is Beatrice’s pipe from Umineko, which I tried to mod into the game as a health item. Because obviously the correct response to knowing you can use a pipe as health item in Postal “what if her smoking gear restored HP?”
Some people might be wondering why I’m writing this retrospective on my personal history with the franchise and breaking it into parts. The short answer is: I’m about to play Postal: Brain Damaged on console and compare it to the desktop version.
So I figured, why not break each game into its own article and then compile everything into a much longer post later? Also, cut me some slack—I’ve never done a proper multi-part article series before.
Until next time,
This is The Professor.
Fly safe.