10 Classic Moments In POSTAL History!
POSTAL's contribution to your corruption!
By Bill "The Game Doctor" Kunkel

In the decade we’ve been producing POSTAL games, everyone at Running With Scissors, from Vince Desi to the Golden Gimp, has crammed more memorable moments into our lives than Richard Gere can stuff gerbils up his butt. Therefore, in this final issue of our tenth year, we have gathered up ten of the most important, whimsical, kinky, hilarious and just plain sick moments still on file in our collective mental database:

1997: RWS has a lawsuit filed against it by the United States Post Office and received a Threatening Letter from the Postmaster General himself. This letter, by the way, was inspired by the mere announcement of our game’s TITLE, not the game itself. Oh yeah, they lost and we got the kind of publicity about which other companies dream.

• November, 1997: Sen. Joe Lieberman Condemns the Original POSTAL on the Senate Floor . He thereby marks us as officially “controversial,” “notorious” and, ultimately, “The World’s Most Dangerous Software Company.” This attack plants a seed that will help nurture RWS well into the next millennium… and beyond!

• 2002: RWS Hires Gary Coleman as Spokesperson for POSTAL. My initial call to Gary went something like this: ‘Hey Gary, my name is Vince, my co is RWS, and we want you to star in our next game, POSTAL 2. Visit us here in Tucson!’ Gary responds: ‘I hate Tucson. I lived in that shithole of a town years ago.’” But Vince was persuasive, as always, and Gary eventually agreed. Since he refused to fly Southwest Airlines, however, RWS had to fly him through Las Vegas, and with delays, he actually arrived around 1:30 in the morning following a six-hour trip from LA to Tucson. “He came to the office, where we had a pseudo digitized image of him set up,” Vince recalls. “He loved it and the rest is history.” And a synergistic success for both sides. RWS had guaranteed press coverage at every major event and even Gary’s career revived. In fact, when A&E ran his life story on an episode of “Biography” the show was updated to include Gary’s connection with POSTAL 2. Pure kismet.

• May2003: The Birth of the Postal Babes! The event was E3 at the LA Convention Center and Vince hired a trio of hot, local models to accompany him and Gary Coleman around the massive videogame expo. Vince remembers: “I had given the girls instructions to unzip their pants on cue and show off their brand new Postal Babes thongs. We started out at the center of the MicroSoft booth and it was insane, the crowd roared, cameras flashed and the attention never stopped as we proceeded through the show floor” The next day, however, upon arrival at the LACC, the RWS retinue was approached by several rent-a-cops who warned that a repeat performance could land the most famous “Desi” since “Babaloo” was a hit song, in jail! “So I told the head security guy he should assign himself to me, Gary and the girls, so we would remain within the rules,” Vince suggested. Many grateful kisses from the Postal Babes and a hundred bucks later, “we had our own E3 security,” Vince recalls fondly.

• 2003: Vince Awards POSTAL “Most Outrageous Game” Award at ECTS. At this massive London-based videogame expo, VD was interviewed on camera for a UK TV Game Show (probably Gamer.TV), and since it was just after the awards ceremony, “the first thing I did was state how proud and thankful I was for POSTAL having won the Most Outrageous Game Award.” The fact that no such “Award” existed deterred neither Vince nor the oblivious game reporter. “The interviewer was like: ‘Wow that’s great!’” Vince then proceeded to continue on with the interview. So very RWS, don’tcha think?

• 2003: Vince Dingles in the Pringles on RWS Press Junket. Flying in influential game journalists to pitch your product during editorial junkets became a way of life (and, in this decade, ultimately led to the death of E3 as a massive industry expo). But by 2003, RWS was fully into that game and thereby created memories that those journalists will remember for the rest of their life. On this occasion, we had Vince, Mark Shander, two major editors from the game press and a pair of Postal Babes riding around Tucson in a limo. Vince suddenly has to piss like a racehorse and so the driver puts the hammer down in search of a men’s room. Alas, ten minutes pass and there's still no sign of a restroom. Snacks are strewn about the passenger section of the limo, and no one's touched a drink for about half an hour. Everyone in the limo has his or her legs crossed. The limo driver promises it won't be long, but Vince has stretched the envelope that is his bladder beyond the point of no return, so he instructs one of the editors to pass him a can of Pringles potato chips. "Excuse me, gentlemen," Vince apologizes as he removes the plastic cover, moves forward to the edge of his seat, and with the Pringle can under him, unzips and fills the container to the brim while moaning in pleasure and sounding like nothing so much as the audio track of an adult movie. One editor is soon laughing so hard he lets loose some of his own stream and then has to shut it down, followed by an announcement regarding how much this hurts. Vince carefully replaces the Pringles lid and asks an editor to hold the can while he zips up. Vince then rolls down the window and tosses the can out the window, as the limo continues on its way. As Vince recalls: “Long story short, between the escorts, and more events like those in the limo, the editors can't blow the smiles off of their faces for days after returning home, and POSTAL gets the reputation that it was created by the most dangerous developers ever... and the press LOVES it.

• January,2005: RWS Kinks Up CES! Vince, MikeJ and Gary Coleman arrived in Las Vegas to meet up with locals Ms. Hades and The Game Doctor (as well as a pair of models to work the booth as PBabes) and as Ms. Hades remembers: wasn’t it 2005 when you, Mike and Gary C. came to Las Vegas for C.E.S.? “We had to put the top down on my convertible so we could fit Vince, Mike, Bill and all the Postal swag in my car.,” Ms. H remembers. “Once we got to the convention site, Mike and I did poster placement and booth set-up. We decided on the best place to strategically plaster POSTAL 2 posters – the men’s urinal!” As for the booth, even with Babes and the unveiling of the Postal thong, the booth needed that something extra, so Ms. H drove back to her dungeon, picked up a few toys and the Postal booth came to life with whips, chains, paddles, rope and other spanky bits. In fact, the bathroom proved such an excellent site for hanging P2 posters, Vince decided to conduct a photo shoot in the woman’s bathroom. But just as the Postal Babes mounted the sinks, security was on the scene. Having long since learned what to do in such situations, Vince once again parlayed a little female attention and a C note, and next thing we knew, “security” escorted the crew to a closed conference room where we had free reign!

• 2007: Gary Coleman Finds New Income Stream from Success with RWS! POSTALite Justin Anderson recently discovered [via http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180175367243] that a Gamecube console and six games autographed by Gary Coleman “recently sold on eBay for $510. Given a used Gamecube is barely worth $40 on its own these days, and the games are all fairly common, I'd say the value increase was rather decent.” We agree, Justin. See? We told you this was a win-win deal for both parties!

• 2007: POSTAL Goes to the Movies. After a nerve-rattling wait, Uwe Boll’s hilarious film version of POSTAL debuted in Germany to rave reviews. The film is scheduled to open in the States and Canada in February with RWS especially stoked that Universal has picked up the marketing rights for North America.

• 2007: POSTAL Celebrates 10 th Birthday with POSTAL X! It is, without a doubt, the finest collection of videogames and related swag ever sold to the public; it’s got the games, the music, special features and, of course, the POSTALforms kit, with which fans can create their own infinite POSTAL tableaus. Check it out, there’s a picture right here!

And with those ten events now having been catalogued for the benefit of historical research, we wish you’d check out the rest of this issue and then we’d like to wish you all the most Postal possible holiday season…