Desperate To Offend

During the period 1996-2011 when Duke Nukem Forever consistently failed to be released, and we made jokes about it, a series was born. A series so desperate and eager to be edgy and offensive, it didn’t so much court controversy as draft the likes of Gary

Once there was a man name Vince Desiderio. That man had a dream. His dream was to be known as Vince Desi. After achieving that dream, he started on another dream: to create a videogame so offensive, but also so awesome, he would become world famous.

As the millennium dawned, the problem for edgy auteurs was that the wider culture was coming to terms with games. Games were becoming normalised. Ordinary, boring people were playing games. This was intolerable! Something had to be done!

Postal, an inconsistently-isometric level-based shooter, came out in 1997 to a reasonable degree of shrieking conservative self-righteousness, which must have pleased Vince Desi. The Postal Dude had to shoot up an air-force base, after all. And the game ended with him trying to massacre a bunch of kids in a school, and having his gun jam and the whole thing turn out to be a psychotic hallucination, because this was 1997 and not even Vince Desi was edgy enough to ask players to kill kids. (Pause to reflect on subsequent events far worse than the most depraved fiction.)

Anyway, Postal went away and people stopped talking about Running With Scissors and for Vince Desi and his producer MikeJ (sic) this, even more than the idea of office drones playing games, was the REAL outrage. So RWS got itself an Unreal 2 license and began putting together Postal 2.

Now, you have to remember that back in 2003, narrative FPS was all about escapism, right? Gamers wanted far off worlds or crazy dimensional-ripping antics, or to be a vampire or a cyborg or something. Yes, GTA Vice City was out there, but it was a far cry even from late 2004’s San Andreas.

Then along comes Postal 2, a game with the central premise of... running errands for your horrible wife?

The game took place over a week in the life of Postal Dude, a trenchcoat-wearing nobody from a town called Paradise, Arizona. His attempt to just go and do a bunch of ordinary stuff is met with hostility, ridicule, violence, basically every stereotype of American behaviour that today would just be too obvious to parody. Though it will help you win an election, apparently.

Seriously, Postal 2 sounds like GTA V. It was a deliberately tasteless caricature of the real world, where the mildly annoying antics of our fellow citizens was blown way out of proportion. Sure, GTA V is all about awesome heists and what it’s like trying to be an upstanding criminal in an uncaring, consumerist world, but all the set-dressing - the sexist billboards, the moronic radio show hosts, the pathetic puns, the fat joggers - all this stuff was in Postal 2, back in 2003.

Postal 2 was so outrageous that Australia banned its sale. So did New Zealand and Malaysia. And yet, Postal Dude was not introduced to the player mid-coitus with a mate’s girlfriend in a filthy trailer. And when challenged, by his mate, on the issue of infidelity with said girlfriend, Postal Dude did not immediately stomp his mate to death, and then walk away to face absolutely no consequences whatsoever. GTA V’s Trevor Phillips is introduced that way. As you well know.

Okay, so GTA V doesn’t let the player grab a cat and shove it on the end of a rifle to function as a living suppressor (good for only nine shots, geddit?), or set an elephant on fire to spread fear and confusion. But that’s not the point. The point is that this game, so offensive and outrageous in 2003, now comes across as merely dumb.

It even had a bizarre retro-celebrity

Postal 2, a game with the central premise of... running errands for your horrible wife

cameo before that kind of thing was made cool by, I guess, Henry Winkler in Arrested Development? The Fonz returned to TV screens just months after Postal 2’s release, but Gary Coleman, of all people, was there on day one, inciting a riot in a police station. So was Osama Bin Laden, various references to other pop culture icons, and in the ultimate act of self-referential self-indulgence, Vince Desi and MikeJ themselves. MikeJ was even a boss. His office was in the toilet, because Never Punch Down. The Postal Dude worked for Running With Scissors, in the game, see. It’s meta. You probably don’t understand all the layers.

Anyway, in the markets that let Postal 2 go on sale, reception was... mixed. Because despite this ahead-of-its-time metatextuality (snort) and the way it hinted at how games could be so much more than fantasy or sci-fi or boring simulators, it was, in its original form at least, kind of crap. Just... not that good a game. That’s the problem with games. They can’t just be satire or commentary or a poke-in-the-eye for political correctness. They also have to be good games.

Unfortunately, Computer Gaming World gave it a zero, which was PR gold as far as Running With Scissors was concerned. They plastered that all over the box. Vince Desi and all his little wizards have, through an endless series of expansions and remakes, since made it their mission to court every disaffected anti-social yuks-a-plenty moron who takes PRIDE, actual PRIDE in the fact that Postal, as a fictional universe, is a place of dumb jokes. A place where you can unlock a “get yourself checked for gonorrhoea” sub-quest by urinating anywhere in the game world. Oh what’s that? No no, you don’t get POINTS for urinating on homeless people or dismembered corpses! In fact you can get through the entire game without using any violence at all! (Cue adenoidal chuckling and a yowl as another cat is inserted, anus-first, onto a shotgun.)

Of course there’s a Postal 3. Co-developed with some mob called TrashMasters and published by Akella by way of Steam, it came out in 2011 and augmented the recently defunct Osama Bin Laden with a new satirical antagonist ripped from the headlines... uh, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez? [Checks research.] Yes. That seems to be correct. Hugo Chavez. Whatever, Postal 3 was critically panned and Vince Desi has since disowned it. As in, he had it deleted from the Running With Scissors website and literally told fans to save their money. Work on the Postal franchise continues to this day.

So, in hindsight, was Postal 2 really ahead of its time, John the Baptist to GTA V’s (anti) Christ? Or were Vince Desi and MikeJ and Gary Coleman and a subculture of powerless pallid 20-somethings too disaffected to even be properly angry about anything, just a little quicker than the rest of us to embrace true artistic honesty?

Postal 2 is no GTA V. Because behind the “jokes”, it’s so grim, so cheerless. It ends in a realisation of our most suppressed and atavistic fear of all - nuclear fire. At the core, it’s a basic story about an unhappy man who has a terrible life he can never escape or improve.

That’s right. For people trying to understand society in 2017, Postal 2 is just too damn real.