

I asked Jaret if this had anything to do with the Double Fine ribbing, but he didn't want to discuss GamerGate. Schafer, by contrast, has spoken against GamerGate, most recently while hosting the 2015 Game Developers Choice Awards. Running With Scissors has also supported GamerGate in posts to its official forums, disagreeing with feminist criticism from Anita Sarkeesian and taking a stand against what it perceives as a lack of journalistic ethics.īeing pooped on by an elephant is one of the tamer moments. Given its politically incorrect shock value, it's not surprising that GamerGate has rallied around Postal. There's not much thought that goes into a lot of this.
"We've got a designer and the designer wrote what he wrote," Jaret said. Postal lampoons Jaret, Running With Scissors CEO Vince Desi, Postal III, which was outsourced to a Russian developer and which Jaret called a "debacle," and the Postal movie. "We poke fun at ourselves all the time too." "I would say we just poke fun at everybody and this time the person that gets it, gets it," Jaret said. It's a fair shot, but things escalated to borderline incitement when a Tim Schafer stand-in came at me with an automatic weapon and I had to murder him. Players were understandably upset and Spacebase now has mostly negative reviews on Steam. The original plan was to keep adding new features, some of which Double Fine abandoned after development didn't go as planned.
Postal 2 poster Pc#
One poster in particular pokes fun at Spacebase DF-9, a PC game Double Fine sold as an early beta. The studio was founded by Tim Schafer, creator of classic adventure games like Grim Fandango and generally a well-liked person in the industry. Then I noticed that all the posters in the office were parodies of Double Fine games. With jokes about downloadable content and microtransactions, at first this seemed like "punching up" at big game publishers and their aggressive monetization methods. The worst of Postal 2: Paradise Lost I saw (and admittedly I didn't get too far into it) involved a mission in which Running With Scissors, itself an entity within the game, sent me to sabotage a rival game developer. It's all here and you're right to be upset. Life on the internet has burnt out the parts of my brain responsible for feeling outrage years ago, but I understand that much of Postal 2's jokes are hugely offensive. It's very similar to the original game, with take-no-prisoners, South Park-style satire, but nowhere nearly as funny and smart as South Park. What started as "quick and dirty" ballooned into a 14 month-long project, which uses the same environment from Postal 2-a small town in Arizona called Paradise-but sets it in the wake of a nuclear explosion. "We were trying to think about the next logical step and we tinkered with a couple of ideas, and then it became obvious that with all the copies that we were selling that what's most important and what's easiest for us to work on since we have guys that have been modding this game for a decade is some quick and dirty downloadable content." "All I know is that a lot of people bought it," he said.

Running With Scissors' VP of Business Development Mike Jaret told me Postal 2 has been gathering a new and enthusiastic following since 2012, when it was released on Valve's digital games distribution platform Steam.Īt first, Valve wasn't interesting in hosting Postal 2 on its platform, but when it introduced Greenlight, a program where developers can submit games and have players vote on whether they'd like them added to Steam, Postal 2 was quickly voted in. Paradise Lost uses the same game engine Postal 2 used in 2003, which didn't look that great back then, and looks terrible today. It's not like it makes Postal 2 look like a new game. They're proud of Postal 2, but the decision to release an $8 expansion pack that requires players to own the original game is still bizarre at first sight. Computer Gaming World, a prominent PC gaming magazine at the time, gave Postal 2 its first ever score of 0 out of 100, saying that "until someone boxes up syphilis and tries to sell it at retail, Postal 2 is the worst product ever foisted upon consumers." Developer Running With Scissors now treats this as a badge of honor. Pee functionality didn't impress most critics when Postal 2 was first released in 2003.
