Postal Open Source – It has been nearly 20 years since the controversial release of the top down action shooter Postal. Developer Running With Scissors announced yesterday that the game was going Open Source and being released into the public domain under the GPLv2 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release in 2017.
Now that Postal is open source and the source code is freely available on BitBucket, the next logical phase of the game’s history is for the community of developers to take the lead in creating game modifications, freeware ports and clones. This is similar to how both the original Doom and Duke Nukem 3D games have gone. Their source code was released to the public and a number of clones were created and have become highly successful in their own right. The question regarding Postal is will there be enough community development and following for independent/amateur game developers to create a clone for a 20 year old game?
Our guess is that the main source code will be compiled and released making the game freely and legally available for download and play. Although free is kind of relative term considering that the original Postal is available on Steam for a paltry sum of $0.49, which is 75% off the current Steam retail price of $1.99.
Postal has been re-released a number of times over the years first in 2001 as Postal Plus which included the “Special Delivery” expansion and then a remaster of the game titled Postal Redux released in May 2016. In addition to the traditional PC releases, Postal has also been released for Android, Mac OS X and Linux. Original boxed versions of Postal can get pricey with the game going for as much as $70. In addition to the re-releases Postal has seen two sequels, Postal 2 in 2003 and Postal III in 2011.
Originally released in 1997, Postal is an early 3D shooter played from a top down isometric view. Players control “Postal Dude” who is unstable after being evicted from his home. He is under the assumption that poison gas is being released into his town and only he is unaffected by it.
At their disposal players will have various weapons including machine guns. These weapons are used to complete Postal’s primary objective, to kill as many armed characters on the current map. In order to proceed to the next map/screen players must kill a certain percentage of characters.
