Running With Scissors built a game about a man committing mass murder in an American town, named it after the phrase for workplace shootings, and became a lightning rod for every argument about violence in games — banned in fourteen countries.
Postal was not a game that accidentally offended. It cast the player as a gunman murdering civilians in an ordinary American town, took its title from the vocabulary of real workplace massacres, and pursued an aesthetic of nihilistic provocation with complete deliberateness. Running With Scissors understood exactly what they were making and exactly how it would be received, and the international bans that followed — fourteen countries, plus retail blacklisting in the United States — functioned less as a setback than as confirmation of the brand.
What makes Postal genuinely difficult is that the standard defences of violent games fit it badly. Doom's violence was abstract and its targets were demons; Mortal Kombat's gore was cartoonish and consensual within its fiction. Postal offered neither shield. It is the strongest test case available for anyone who believes there should be limits on game content, because it applies the medium's most principled arguments — that games are fiction, that players distinguish fantasy from reality — to material selected precisely for its capacity to appal.
Thirty years on, the arguments have largely survived the test. No credible evidence has ever connected Postal to real-world violence, and the moral panic it provoked followed the identical arc as those around Death Race, Mortal Kombat, and Doom before it: alarm, legislative attention, calls for prohibition, and eventual quiet irrelevance. Running With Scissors remains banned in New Zealand and Germany, and remains in business. The lesson the case teaches is uncomfortable for both sides: that a genuinely tasteless game can be defended on principle, and that defending it on principle does not oblige anyone to pretend it is good.
Banned in fourteen countries and blacklisted by major American retailers; the studio remains banned in New Zealand and Germany, and has embraced the notoriety as its brand ever since.