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Postal

(Boss Fight Books #23)

Brock Wilbur,

Nathan Rabin (Goodreads Author)

3.91 · Rating details · 44 ratings · 9 reviews

In 1997, game studio Running With Scissors released its debut title, Postal, an isometric shooter aimed at shocking an imagined pearl-clutching public. The game was crass, gory, and dumb—all of which might have been forgivable if the game had been any fun to play.

Postal gained enough notoriety from riding the wave of public outrage to warrant a sequel. And DLC. And a rema ...more

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Paperback, 176 pages

Published April 7th 2020 by Boss Fight Books

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Apr 23, 2020 David rated it it was amazing

Shelves: games

As a writer, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about voice. (Or perhaps ordinate, given that writers are supposed to be obsessive.) I'll read anything by anyone, so long as his/her/their voice grabs me from page one. POSTAL co-author Brock Wilbur reserves the first chapter for a hilarious story about a childhood friend whose religious parents deemed Super Mario Bros. too violent to play. For a lark, Wilbur showed his buddy Postal. His friend was reduced to a quivering mound of flesh, As a writer, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about voice. (Or perhaps ordinate, given that writers are supposed to be obsessive.) I'll read anything by anyone, so long as his/her/their voice grabs me from page one. POSTAL co-author Brock Wilbur reserves the first chapter for a hilarious story about a childhood friend whose religious parents deemed Super Mario Bros. too violent to play. For a lark, Wilbur showed his buddy Postal. His friend was reduced to a quivering mound of flesh, and not in the Penthouse Letters sort of way.

Right there, Wilbur had me, and he never lost me. POSTAL is hilarious, insightful, thoughtful, and surprisingly heavy: I came away from this book with a lot to think about, much more than any Postal game has ever given me to chew on.

POSTAL, the book, is the joint enterprise of Wilbur and Nathan Rubin, the latter a film critic whose contribution is an insightful deep dive into infamous director Uwe Boll's widely panned film adaptation. This section is, like the rest of the book, fantastic. I hadn't thought of Boll or his movies in years, so the last thing I expected when I sat down to read a book about the making of an equally infamous and reviled video game franchise was to feel sympathy for Boll and gain appreciation for his work. Or at least his adaptation of Postal, which, God help me, I kind of want to watch.

Right there, I admitted that I'm part of the problem. Boll's earliest game-to-film adaptations were so dreadful that I, like so many, assumed any subsequent movie of his would be a running gag because Boll had become a running gag the world over. Rabin makes clear that Postal is far from a great film, or even a good one. He also raises the possibility that maybe it's not quite as bad as all that.

Wilbur's portion of the book, parts one and three--with an early chapter written by Boss Fight editor Gabe Durham to add some context to Postal's release--was captivating in a different way. I loved what I was reading, but I couldn't find the voice he employed to tell the story. This seemed critical to me. Wilbur recounts his road trip to visit Postal's co-creators, and how he physically, mentally, and emotionally braced himself to stomach their abhorrent far-right politics. He was a journalist with a job to do. I've been there. Many times. In fact, I often envy my peers who get to talk with creators I haven't had the time or opportunity to meet. Not this time.

The first Postal is a game in which nothing is sacred. One gets the feeling while playing it that its creators are trolls; they're in the biz for the LOLs, and if that upsets you, so much the better. Postal (the game) co-creator Vince Desi is known for being unapologetically blunt. Wilbur's own tone comes close to this. It's clear he doesn't care for Postal, or for Desi or, to a lesser degree, Desi's business partner. The result is a voice that is equal parts trenchant and bleak. He matches Desi and his business partner tit for tat without being crass or dismissive. He even admits that Postal 2 and its expansion have some redeeming qualities. They're more fun than their original, which always seemed to me as a game that was edgy for the sake of edginess. Look how provocative I am!

But I didn't put my finger on "bleak" as the second component of Wilbur's voice until the book's final chapter. He touches on the role, or lack thereof, of violent video games in the role of mass shootings in America, an unending string of tragedies that was an epidemic before COVID came to our shores. Wilbur makes it clear that video games have unfairly been painted as a boogeyman, but he's unrelentingly, and understandably, bleak about the future of gun control (spoiler: there isn't one) in America.

Wilbur pushes back against the depravity of Postal's content by incisively dissecting it. His wit fails him in the final chapter, and with good reason. Gun violence is ugly, it's pointless, it's wrong, but we can't stop it because the powers that be will never let us stop it. That just fucking sucks. Wilbur knows that.

Don't get me wrong. Wilbur is an excellent writer, witty and acerbic precisely when the story calls for those beats. You'll learn something, and be entertained the whole way through. But this is also a somber story about a franchise whose events so often imitate reality. Every Boss Fight publication I've read was written by an author who, with few exceptions, wrote about one of their favorite games because it was one of their favorite games. I got the distinct impression that writing about Postal and its creators was an almost Sisyphean task for Wilbur. That's a different sort of connection I'm glad I got to explore, and one just as important as any other documented across Boss Fight's phenomenal series.
...more

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Apr 23, 2020 Jake rated it it was amazing

the running with scissors devs are two guys that kind of the darker versions of trey parker and matt stone of video games. i'm familiar of vince desi from the pigeon mission video on youtube, but finding out that he made his break in the games industry by making sesame street games was amazing. A bit like finding out the blues clues guy had a serious coke habit (this was a elaborate internet hoax). while i came to this book for the rabin contribution it was the most uninteresting, uwe bowl being ...more

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May 02, 2020 Patrick Simmons rated it did not like it

In a book about a game from 1997, Wilbur still manages to somehow dedicate a portion of the book to complaining about Donald Trump's presidency - y'know, the one that started nearly twenty years after the game came out?

Wilbur's clear disdain for a lot of things shows - and as he paints us a picture of Postal creator Vince Desi as a brash, unlikable guy who Wilbur heroically manages to find factors of interest in (thanks in large part to Postal 2 co-creator Mike J) - though not enough interest to In a book about a game from 1997, Wilbur still manages to somehow dedicate a portion of the book to complaining about Donald Trump's presidency - y'know, the one that started nearly twenty years after the game came out?

Wilbur's clear disdain for a lot of things shows - and as he paints us a picture of Postal creator Vince Desi as a brash, unlikable guy who Wilbur heroically manages to find factors of interest in (thanks in large part to Postal 2 co-creator Mike J) - though not enough interest to speak to beyond a drunken evening, choosing instead to rush out in the morning - it ends up painting Wilbur as the less likeable character DESPITE Desi's clear attitude of not caring if you like him.

Contributions by editor Gabe Durham are in the same vein as Wilbur's writing - focused less on Postal itself and more on their perceived Postal player, a seeming white-supremacist neo-Nazi would-be-mass-murderer boogyman who wants to be, according to Durham's chapter, William Foster from "Falling Down" - despite Forester killing only about 8 people, almost all in self-defense (and at least one accidentally), one of who he kills because the victim IS a Nazi. Go figure.

Rabin's section - focusing on Uwe Boll's Postal film - is annoying in it's own way (though Rabin still manages to bring Trump's presidency in for some reason or another), as he spends far too much time talking about himself. Rabin understands Boll, we learn, because like Boll, Rabin is some sort of tortured artist whose dislike of the system (Hollywood for Boll, film criticism for Rabin) comes from their working in it and understanding it so deeply. Presumably Rabin is looking for more work, as he nearly writes a CV for himself in there.

The book has it's moments - Rabin has a few interesting (though not particularly novel) things to saw about Boll, and Wilbur's interview with Desi (when it's actually Desi and Mike J's responses in print as opposed to Wilbur's internal monologue) has some great moments of interest.

That said, it's not worth the $15 price of admission for paperback (or whatever I paid in the Kickstarter) nor the $5 for Kindle, and barely worth the couple hours it takes to read it (it's short, which is perhaps it's best quality). There is far better stuff written on every subject this book touches upon, no matter which side of any of the issues you stand on. ...more

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Mar 27, 2020 Peter Derk rated it liked it

I feel two ways about this book because there are two books here. There is the book by Brock Wilbur, which is more focused on the game, Postal, and there’s the book by Nathan Rabin, which is more focused on the movie of the same name, made by infamous director Uwe Boll. The way the book works, there’s about half of Wilbur’s book, then the entirety of Rabin’s book, then we go back to Wilbur.

Let’s do all of Wilbur’s book first.

I think this comes from a Donald Trump thing. Hang with me. I don’t r ...more

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Mar 31, 2020 Caleb Ross rated it it was amazing

Shelves: type-ebooks, video-games, own, nonfiction, type-paperback

(click the image below to watch the video review)

I’m reviewing all of the Boss Fight Books releases, so subscribe to my YouTube channel to be sure you don’t miss future reviews.

Can you love something even if the creator of that thing is awful?

The modern highway system is great, but we have to thank Hitler for that. Penicillin is cool, but it was made by a disgusting moldy sandwich (that I've heard also hated Jews). This book, Postal, it’s great, but it was created by the awful Brock ...more

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Apr 11, 2020 Mike added it

I read this since I'm a fan of Nathan's site and it seemed like an interesting idea to do this for a "33-1/3-type" game docu-series; it was a quick and easy read and enjoyable in both the game and film sides. As another reviewer mentioned this seems like it was a bit of trouble for Wilbur at least, but I think it came together in the end. Leaving it unrated since it just seems like something I wouldn't read normally, and it's short (I've read longer articles on the intehwebz). But it kindled my ...more

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Oct 07, 2020 Idiot Elemental rated it it was amazing

Made me accidentally buy postal 4 for some reason

Extremely empathetic read, despite the entirety of the topic =)

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Apr 18, 2020 Skylar Primm rated it really liked it

I picked this book up for Nathan Rabin's contribution, because I'm a huge fan of his "My World of Flops" work. Nobody writes about bad movies like Nathan Rabin, and Postal is the ultimate bad movie. I was pleasantly surprised to find an equally fascinating story about the game development side of the equation.

I'm definitely interested in checking out other Boss Fight books in the future. ...more

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Feb 28, 2021 Grant Erickson rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: video-games

A very short read, but probably too long for this subject. No surprise that the main creator of the game is pretty much an Edge-lord. All I knew about this game was the controversy surrounding it, so it was interesting to read about the actual gameplay and levels. It shows the game as what it truly is, which is an un-fun grim-dark slog.

The back half is devoted to Uwe Boll, who is always entertaining to read about, way more than actually watching his films. The anecdote of him boxing his biggest ...more

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