During Gamescom 2025 we had the opportunity to sit down with Vince Desi, Founder, Michael Jaret-Schachter, Chief Bidet Officer, and Pedro Santos, Community Manager, at Running With Scissors, the creators of the POSTAL franchise.
Alongside this trio, we also sat down and spoke with Eric Masher, COO and Co-Founder of Flat2VR Studios, who are developing the recently crowdfunded POSTAL 2 Redux and POSTAL 2 VR, a remake and VR edition of the 2003 cult classic PC game. The Kickstarter for the game is live now, ending on September 12th 2025, and has already hit its initial starting goal after less than 48 hours.
The POSTAL franchise has seen numerous entries across multiple forms of media. To this day the original two games are still receiving official active support and the DLC for POSTAL: Brain Damaged launched at the time of writing .
First off, congratulations on the successful Kickstarter. The game managed to be funded in a single day! Was this your first time managing a kickstarter campaign?
Eric: We’ve historically been very skittish to run a crowdfunding campaign. The ones we have done have always been successful, but it’s still always a risk. You’re putting yourself out there and if it fails then everybody sees that fail. Thankfully, not only did it not fail but it was funded in under 2 days!
Not only did it not fail, it was an immediate success.
Eric: Right, right. It’s a testament to the power of the franchise. I don’t think we could’ve done this with any other IP that we work with. But for POSTAL it made sense because of the audience. We still had a little fear that it wouldn’t succeed, you can never escape that feeling, but we were fairly confident that this kickstarter would succeed.
Mike:It’s also a testament to our faith in you guys [Flat2VR Studios] to get it done. We were very confident in the product succeeding and very comfortable with you guys handling the IP. And we were right to be so.
The original POSTAL 2 launched in 2003. Where did the spark for POSTAL 2 Redux come from?
Vince:Well, historically Running With Scissors has always supported all of its games. It was only a year ago that we released a new, free update to the first POSTAL game, which was originally released in 1997. We do this because we have the greatest fans in gaming and we want to support them.
POSTAL 2 is the most successful title in the POSTAL series and we’ve wanted to do a redux for a while, but one of the challenges in the gaming industry is who do you work with? People want to work with us all the time and I’m not anti-people but most of the time these people are full of sh*t. They want to take advantage of the brand and minimise the risk, but we’ve always felt the most important component of any game is the fans, the community. We weren’t going to do anything that would disappoint our fans.
One day Eric called me and said “Guys, we want to make POSTAL 2 for VR. What do you think?” And I said “You do know that we’re the people who stick guns up cats asses and set people on fire, right?” And he just laughed at that. Before I could even go for the home run, Eric then said back “And we love pissing!”. “Holy shi*t, we found our publisher.” I thought; it was a match made in heaven. (everyone laughs)
We have been blessed by Eric and his team. They did a wicked job with the successful kickstarter and getting fans to wishlist the game. People think talent is important. Yes it is. People think money is important. Yes it is. But, I’ll tell you what is MOST important: Passion. That’s what Flat2VR brought to us and it’s really been a good thing. That to me is the key to the success of this whole kickstarter.
Let me tell you, the fans of POSTAL 2 are brutally honest about what they like and don’t like, and it’s our job to listen to them and be respectful.
Comparing the original POSTAL 2 and Redux
Mike: But there also has to be a purpose here, right? The concept of remaking POSTAL 2 has come up thousands of times over the years. We even began the process of remaking it ourselves before it transitioned into POSTAL 4. We’ve had companies approaching us about this, offering to remake the game and get it on consoles, and while yes we do want it on consoles, or a new version on Steam, there has to be a reason to do it. A reason to remake the game and not just milk the IP for the sake of rereleasing the game. I think the VR is a good new addition that justifies a remake.
Eric: To add to that, the VR part of this started first. We didn’t call the guys up and offer to make POSTAL 2 Redux, we offered to make POSTAL 2 VR. We believed that the game deserves to be in VR and then Redux was born out of that. We had to make a whole bunch of changes and updates to make POSTAL 2 VR ready, and if we were already going to all this trouble then it just made sense to go all the way and remake the entire game.
Mike: Yeah, it wasn’t like ‘Let’s make a redux so we can make a quick buck.’ A VR port wasn’t going to work in the old engine that POSTAL 2 is built on, so we had to remake the game for VR anyway. Now remaking the game entirely made sense and so we thought we could make the project bigger.
On the topic of VR, what were some of the challenges of bringing forward such an old and fairly feature rich game to a new engine, let alone VR?
Eric: It’s not the game itself that’s the problem. There’s nothing in POSTAL 2 that was a challenge to make work in VR. In fact, you can take any game, it doesn’t matter how old it is or the gameplay, and put it in VR. The challenge is all about figuring out what translates WELL into VR. It could be a 2D game, you just have to reimagine how it works in VR.
What’s important when bringing games to VR is the player interaction. You don’t just want it to be a bunch of button presses, like you’re still sitting in front of a tv and playing with a controller. You have to make sure that the player feels like they are interacting with the VR and making VR movements.
A good example is how the HUD looks in VR; making that look natural is a challenge, not anything about the gameplay itself. If you were to take a traditional flat-game and just copy the HUD over directly into VR, the VR player is just going to have a big wall of text in front of them at all times that’s completely immersion breaking. That has to change.
UI and UX is probably one of the most important features of a game that we work on when transitioning a previously flat-game into VR.
For VR, what were some of the challenges with trying to create an interactive environment and to what extent can we mess with the world?
Eric: You can’t do it half-way, it’s all or nothing. You have to be able to use every weapon and you have to be able to use it physically. You gotta be able to piss in VR and it’s got to be visible.
Mike: You gotta shove a gun up a cat’s ass in VR.
Eric: (laughs) Right, exactly. Here’s what you can’t do in VR. You can’t give players an interaction they want to do and then tell them they can’t do it. If they want to shove a gun up a cat’s ass then they have to be able to. If they can’t then fans will be pissed off and that’s a problem. You either commit to doing this and making a fully interactable virtual reality, or you just don’t do it at all.
This is where a lot of VR companies start to go a little bit wrong, in my opinion. They just want to put a game into virtual reality without making it feel like a VR game. It happened with Hitman1, when they ported that into VR, and it was a failure. Hitman was a 5/5 game when it was a flat-game but when they put it in VR it was a 2.5/5 game. Why? Because they didn’t go the full mile to make it a proper immersive VR experience.
Vince: The thing also is that feedback I get from fans that write in about this is that ‘I don’t own VR, I want it but it is expensive, but I am going to get a VR headset for POSTAL.’ Even though it’s expensive they’ll buy a VR headset because they want to play POSTAL in VR, so we need to make sure it’s the best game it can be for them.
Eric: Well that’s the power of the IP. We want nostalgic games and games that people know in virtual reality because they are system sellers. We want players to say that they bought a VR headset so they could play their favourite flat-game in VR. Nostalgic, good games can become VR system sellers and it helps get VR closer to the mainstream.
1The Hitman series is a long-running stealth game currently developed by IO Interactive. In 2024, Hitman 3 was ported to VR as Hitman 3: VR Reloaded.
Will both iterations support mods old and new? And how easy will it be to bring existing mod projects forward?
Mike: Yeah, it won’t work at all. POSTAL 2 Redux is post POSTAL 2 VR, without the VR. It’s a different engine and game entirely so existing mods literally can’t work automatically.
Eric: But of course this is something we want to support. The POSTAL 2 modding community is huge and I’m sure they’ll want to recreate old mods, and make entirely new mods, specifically for POSTAL 2 VR and POSTAL 2 Redux.
With a game that has been running this long and is still actively being supported, I’m not surprised at all that the modding community is massive.
Mike: We love the modders in our community. Running With Scissors has historically hired people from the modding community. Almost everyone who works at Running With Scissors was a fan of the POSTAL series at some point. Jon Merchant, our development director, was one of the modders who worked on the total-conversion Eternal Damnation mod a few years ago.
Vince: That’s just how we do it at Running With Scissors. We share the toilet paper, one roll covers everybody. (everyone laughs)
What do you think the appeal of a game like POSTAL 2 is in 2025 and, despite both its age and reputation, still persists to find new fans?
Mike: To me it’s the notorious game that everyone thinks is banned everywhere when it’s not. An uncancellable game (although I’m aware I am saying this in one of the few countries where it has been indexed [Germany]). Still, it’s a game that has stood the test of time. It is easily available and widely played, still selling hundreds of thousands of units per year. So the appeal is still clearly there.
We made it in 2003 and took a lot of shots from the media back then. They said it didn’t look as good as one game, or didn’t play as well as another, but in the end POSTAL 2 has aged a lot better than all those other games it was compared to. POSTAL 2 is still talked about and selling copies to this day, whereas many of those other games have disappeared.
And as stated earlier, we are still releasing updates for both POSTAL and POSTAL 2. In fact, we have an upcoming update for POSTAL 2 in the works that adds the co-op mod that’s been out for ten years or so at this point, as a standard feature.
Obviously, the appeal for a remake is that there is still an entire community out there that hasn’t touched the game. It doesn’t require an intensive computer to play, but it still requires a computer to play and there are plenty of players out there who only play their games on consoles, and even only in VR.
We want to get it to as many audiences as we can. It’s currently confirmed for PlayStation and VR but we hope to get it on both Xbox and Nintendo Switch as well. Maybe even mobile. None of these are guarantees but we know these devices have players who have heard of POSTAL and might want to try it, but don’t have anything they can play it on.
Requests to get the original POSTAL 2 onto more devices has been like a repetition of gunfire in our ears from fans online. Of course, we want to but the original game is built on a broken, old version of Unreal Engine that barely holds together at the best of times. That’s another reason we are remaking the game, to make a stable version of POSTAL 2 that can be released on more platforms.
Eric: You were asking earlier what the challenges of porting POSTAL 2 to VR are; it is not about the game but all about the engine, which in this case is Unreal Engine 1. If we stayed in that engine then we wouldn’t be able to bring it to VR as it doesn’t support OpenXR.
Mike: That said, we are big VR fans and we have had very broken tech demos working in VR before, that we sent them [Flat2VR Studios]. We’ve had members of our team work on VR ports before just as a hobby, something for us to f*ck around with, but they were never planned to come out.
Eric: To be fair, if you wanted to you can technically mod Unreal Engine 1 and make it VR compatible, but it would never run on [Meta]Quest2. For that, we would have to move the game to Unreal Engine 4 or 5, or change the engine entirely. We decided really early on that in order to make the best VR version of POSTAL 2 we can, and then later the best redux version we can, that a move to a new engine is a must.
2Meta Quest is a publically available VR headset by Meta. The latest version is Meta Quest 3.
Further speaking on the game’s reputation, are there any aspects or features of POSTAL 2 that you’d think the big three console manufacturers will take issue with?
Vince: It’s 2025. I’d like to believe that we’ve made a little progress as an industry. No guarantees but when you look at the amount of games released across all platforms that are far more dramatic and violent, POSTAL 2 should be fine. POSTAL 2 is at least fun. It’s comical with a dark sense of humour.
I’m not in favour of anything that is terribly dramatic as it takes away from the entertainment of the product. In movies it isn’t so bad because you are just watching a movie, but gaming is an interactive medium – you’re living in the game so it is important that it is fun. Afterall, what do you do with a game? You play it, and playing isn’t good if it’s not fun. I think that’s something lost in today’s gaming industry.
I don’t care what platform it is, your game could have the cleanest code and the best visuals, if the game is f*cking boring and unfun then it’s going to bomb.
Something else sang about in this industry is launch day sales. ‘Oh we sold half-a-million units in our first year!’ Great, and then guess what: the game is f*cking dead. Everyone moved on because it’s actually boring and only looked good. You tell me how many games you know have been going on for 20+ years? POSTAL 2 has and that’s because for us, fun is number one. Fun is the reason people come back and that’s why we put play first.
Eric: And that’s what we’ve seen a lot of recently. Sony has given the green light. They requested a couple of minor things and when we accomplished them it was all good for us to go ahead with. When we get there, we believe that Nintendo and Xbox won’t give us any issues either.
Like Vince said, it’s 2025. POSTAL 2 may have been controversial when it came out in 2003 but there have been so many worse games since then that push boundaries constantly. Just look at the Nintendo eShop – there are Hentai games all over it.
Mike: It’s funny because Nintendo is the least strict of the three. If you had told me that 20 years ago I would never have believed you.
Vince: And it was Nintendo who were the first to approve the original POSTAL Redux release five or so years ago. That was so wild to us as we never thought that Nintendo would be the easiest to work with. Sony approved it shortly after and we’re hoping to get it on Xbox soon and then maybe mobile.
I refer to it now as the POSTAL universe because there’ve been a lot of POSTAL games on different platforms, which were blessed to see. The POSTAL community deserves all the credit for that though, not us [Running with Scissors].
POSTAL Redux
I feel like I already know the answer to this but if POSTAL 2 Redux and VR are successful, could we see POSTAL 3 Redux and VR?
Everyone: (Laughs)
Mike: No.
Some things are best left dead. (laughs)
You don’t think it’s worth redoing it and trying to fix/improve the issues that game had?
Mike: We’d rather remake the existing DLCs, Apocalypse Weekend and Paradise Lost, and potentially make a new ‘Week After’ DLC for POSTAL 2.
Is there actual innate value in putting out a POSTAL 3 remake that’s more in-line with what we imagined that game to be? Maybe, but I think if we went back and read the old design documents today that’s not even something we would want to do (even ignoring the history behind that game).
What other games from this era of PC gaming do you hope to give Redux/VR versions to in the future? And is there a desire to adapt games both older and newer? What about games that are not specifically first-person shooters?
Eric: Yeah of course. I would love to see games that I personally played as a kid, like Halo and Bioshock, because they translate well. But I want new stuff too. For us, we aren’t limiting what we want to do and getting stuck in a hole where all we make are VR first-person shooters.
When we talk as a company about what we want to see in VR, I don’t jump in with ‘it needs to be first-person’ or ‘I need to be able to see my hands’. We want to do third person games in VR, sidescrolling platformers and tabletop games. If we narrow our vision down to saying it has to be first-person to be in VR then we are going to lose this battle.
You have to give people an opportunity to experience new things. The days of requiring the player to stand up, spin around and get physical in VR are over. It was cool in the beginning because it was unique.
Now, this doesn’t mean you don’t have physical interactions in VR. Small hand movements, gestures, etc. We just need to make sure that we let people play how they want. Give them a controller if that’s how they want to play in VR. Some people are naturally active, they want to get up and move around, but part of the reason traditional gaming is so popular is because the player can just sit down on a coach or at a desk and still have fun. Some people will have been standing all day for work and just want to rest when they get home. You have to give people the opportunity to sit.
Comparing POSTAL 2 and Redux
Ultimately it’s about providing options. If you want to play the game while moving around or if you want to play it with a controller on the coach, but still in VR, then we’ll have the option to. If you want to eat popcorn or drink while playing the game, we’ll have a playstyle that makes it easy to do that as well.
That said, for POSTAL 2 VR we still want to focus on having no button presses. Manual reload still has to be in there for example. You still have to have a purpose for the headset otherwise it may as well not be in VR at all. We don’t want a game that plays exactly the same as just playing on a computer because why would anyone put the headset on in that case?
Mike: He also wants to make the Running With Scissors vaporwave title Assault & Battery, which was a VR game we were working on back in 2017.
Eric: (laughs)
Mike: Yeah, we do actually have some VR stuff that is not POSTAL related that is currently just sitting on the shelf.
Eric: I tried out Assault & Battery and I think it is a game that people would play today. If we could figure something out we would love to finally release it. The demo I played was so cool and I think VR players would enjoy it.
What has been the most difficult time in Running With Scissors history and how did you solve it?
Vince: I’d say there were two moments. First, is the crisis we faced with POSTAL 3 and Akella. Despite 2+ years of devoted development, with the great, original, development team out in Russia, we made the conscious decision to walk away from the project when they decided to release a game that just did not work. Literally. They were going to sell a game to people that wouldn’t even boot up. Before that could occur, we walked. We announced to the world ‘Look, we aren’t a part of POSTAL 3. It’s just not working out.’
That was by far the most public, challenging event in our history.
The other major event was after POSTAL came out and it got in so much trouble. Howard Stern, the shock job who has now lost his job, said some things about POSTAL on the radio and roped Panasonic into it.
Our publisher at the time was a new label called Ripcord Games, who at the time wanted POSTAL to be their lead title. They believed it would get a lot of attention on them as they were a new label and no one knew who the hell they were. The problem was that Ripcord Games was owned by Panasonic.
Howard started associating Panasonic with POSTAL, and was making fun of them over it. I don’t know why he was doing that, in my opinion Panasonic should have sued his f*cking ass off. But it created a huge problem for us because it led to Panasonic walking away from the project.
Can you believe it? One minute we are on top of the world and then the next we are in court over them abandoning our contract. In fact, we were already in court ourselves fighting over the POSTAL name, when Panasonic walked so it was just back to back legal issues.
Obviously, it didn’t hurt that we got a seven-figure deal from the lawsuit with Panasonic but the truth of the matter is, we wanted POSTAL to actually come out. Because of all this drama we were forced to sit on POSTAL for several years. We actually started working on POSTAL 2 during this time, even though we couldn’t legally release the first POSTAL for a few years.
Those two events were easily the most difficult time for us in the history of POSTAL.
With all your talk on supporting POSTAL and POSTAL 2 for so long, keeping the community active and happy, you must have strong opinions on the Stop Killing Games movement?
Mike: Pedro, our social media director, has a lot of strong opinions on that. (laughs)
Pedro: Absolutely. (laughs) We’ve always been very shocked by the state of preserving video games. There were too many nuances around AAA companies not caring at all to preserve their video games. For example, you have an online-only game that people are paying for and then one day the company just cut support for it. It’s a major blow to the customer, who the AAA company should be caring for.
Unfortunately, this means that it is up to indie developers like Running With Scissors to make the difference, and we’ve been happy to support the Stop Killing Games Initiative since its inception. It’s a cause that we really believe in and are happy to support.
What other changes do you think should occur in the games industry?
Pedro: They should respect their customers a bit more. I think there are a lot of companies out there that don’t understand that it’s the long term support from the fans that keep them alive.
We’re a perfect case study for this, it’s the Running With Scissors community that has kept us going strong since the 90s. A lot of companies don’t make it and are forced to cut down on their resources and we never had to because we care about our community and it supports us in return. If we didn’t give back to the community, we’d be doing a disservice to ourselves.
Mike: Telling people they don’t own a game that they paid for is pretty f*cked up. It’s one thing to kind of know it in your head, that when you buy a game on a digital platform you don’t actually own it. It’s basically like an NFT.
But gaming executives verbalising that, coming out and saying ‘Yeah, you don’t own sh*t.’ It’s terrible. Why the f*ck are you saying that, are you out of your mind? You are only here because players are giving your company money. Without them you would be no one.
Vince: It’s pretty ballsy.
Pedro: It really makes no sense. We’re [Running With Scissors] only here because of our fans and we have to respect them.
Mike: Now there does have to be a limit, you can’t give the fans EVERYTHING they want. Some fans want some really wild sh*t. (laughs)
And yeah, there does have to be an end-of-life in some specific instances. You can’t have the servers for a multiplayer-only game be up forever, it’s just not doable. They will have to go offline eventually. But for a single player game there is no excuse. You can’t just pull it off the store shelves and say that doesn’t exist anymore. At the moment, we get asked everyday if we plan on taking POSTAL 2 down because we are making Redux and the answer is no.
Comparison between POSTAL 2 and Redux
Pedro: Some people still blame us for POSTAL 3 being pulled from store shelves, but we didn’t have anything to do with that. The DRM was not our decision and it’s something that we would never do.
Mike: It’s funny because despite gamers always pushing for preservation of games, we get frequent requests from fans to wipe POSTAL 3 from existence. (laughs)
And my answer is always: ‘Look, I’ll be the first to say that POSTAL 3 blows. I’ll be milking that statement for the rest of my life. But I don’t want POSTAL 3 to be gone from Steam, it’s a part of history.’
And we do our best to support the game, even if we don’t like it. A few years ago we worked hard to get rid of the broken DRM and officialised some of the fan-made patches to try and improve the game. In an ideal world, POSTAL 3 would be free, but that’s not even our call to make. We don’t manage the product on Steam.
Vince: Nor do we make any money from it.
Pedro: It’s all for the support of the community and the people who mod the games. Working closely with the community and promoting mods for our games only benefits us.
Last question, now that the kickstarter has been funded what are the next steps? Do you have an ETA on when we might see POSTAL 2 VR and POSTAL 2 Redux release?
Eric: Our goal is to see them both ready in 2026. We’ll have more information to share soon but we are far from done. The kickstarter is still going [it ends on September 12th 2025], it has been a great way to keep the community busy and gauge interest in the IP. It confirms for us that we are doing the right thing. But we’re not done even when the kickstarter ends. We have backer pledges to fulfill, more plans for the community during the games development and we’ll be back in Germany again for next year’s Gamescom, hopefully with something playable for people to try out.
We want to keep things going steadily and in the meantime Mike and Vince have plans to support the POSTAL games that have already been released.
Mike: Nothing we can talk about yet though.
Everyone: (laughs)
Mike: There is the DLC for POSTAL: Brain Damaged which launches in September [out now as of the release of this interview], but other than that we have nothing else to share at this moment.
Vince: Having been blessed with the community we have, it is beyond a full-time job to keep them all happy. I kid you not, some days I’m up at 5:30am in the morning until 11pm at night and 90% of my time will be spent online with fans. My phone number is public so I get phone calls, my email is public so I get emails, my DMs are open on Discord, I read all the YouTube comments, I get it all!
Mike: You should try to avoid accidentally video calling the entire discord while in the shower though.
Everyone: (laughs)
Vince: If I could just end the interview with this. I’ve been in the gaming industry for 40 years now. Back then, the fans were the most important thing and here we are today and the fans are still the most important. I get asked all the time by new developers what they should be doing to be successful in this industry.
After telling them that they should quit (laughs), I let them know that they need to get their priorities in order, and the first priority is always the fans. That’s just how we are and will continue to be.
