Year 2003. Running With Scissors, the video game studio (which, somehow, is still open), releases Postal 2, the sequel to one of the most violent and crude games in history. In this open world, you can commit all the acts of violence you want, and in fact, the game rewards you for it, to such a sickening extent that it was banned in New Zealand, with a penalty of 10 years in prison and $50,000. It faced issues all over the world, but no one stopped talking about it, and it inevitably became a brutal bestseller despite the critics not being very impressed. And then, the third part arrived.
More violence than ever!
In Running With Scissors, it took eight years to continue the saga, until in 2011 they finally released Postal III, a game that, on paper, was supposed to be a true revolution both graphically and in gameplay… until players discovered, resigned, that it was a complete disaster. It was released exclusively for Windows and abandoned the open world to focus on specific missions with a new third-person perspective that nobody ended up liking. It took all the steps backward that the franchise could have taken and became a resounding failure both critically and commercially.
In fact, the ports that were planned for Xbox 360 and PS3 were never even made, fearing that the backlash would be heard throughout the entire gaming world. There was a reason why Postal III was so bad, of course: the studio was going through the inevitable economic problems that come from having released only two moderately successful games in 15 years, and didn’t know what to do with the license, so they took their initial designs and handed them over to Akella, a Russian producer who developed it for five years. You do it, because it makes me laugh.
But wait, because there’s more: the 2008 crisis wreaked havoc in Russia and ended up further damaging Akella, which categorically refused (aware of the absurdity they were committing) to allow Running With Scissors access to Postal III. What was the result? On one hand, the original studio could not create enough patches to alleviate the mess. On the other, Akella declared bankruptcy immediately, and that is never a good sign. The studio had no choice but to bear the burden and try to release patches to improve the experience, until in 2012 they decided to remove it from their store, asking people to buy their two previous titles, “a far superior product for less money.”
They could not allow this to continue, and in 2015 they prepared an expansion for Postal 2 called Paradise Lost, which began with the protagonist waking up after an eleven-year coma. In other words, completely erasing Postal III from existence and leaving it as a figment of his imagination. In the end, in 2022 Running With Scissors managed to complete their Postal IV which… nobody liked either, this time without any Russian developer to blame. Surely they could say the typical phrase of their protagonist: “I regret nothing!”.
