Postal III/Development

The following is a development history of Postal III.

In the Beginning

Planning and development of Postal III began in early 2006 after Running with Scissors (developer of the Postal series) made a business deal with Akella (Russian publisher of the Postal series and, at the time, the "EA" of Russia). Initial planning was made for the console market with a release date sometime in 2008. To this end, development was given to an internal Akella studio named Trashmasters who had developed several games at this point.

Development of Postal III continued swimmingly with several videos released during 2007-2008 showcasing what the game was supposed to be like. While it didn't make its 2008 or 2009 release, it was looking worth the wait.

2007 POSTAL III OLD GAME TRAILER ( 2007 )	2008 Postal III E3 2008- White Trash Interview HD	2009 Postal E3 2009 Gameplay

Left turn

Unfortunately, due to the 2008 financial crisis (the "Global Economic Meltdown"), business in Russia tanked, causing Akella to make several bad decisions, with the worst being the firing of the Postal III beta team (who are commonly referred to as the A-team and are responsible for the previous builds) and instead having the game rebuilt by a different, smaller, less experienced team (commonly known as the B-team), who would also end up getting fired with the game being frozen until 2010. The game was then brought back with yet another team (known as the C-team) who would also get shitcanned before finally being polished off by a D-team. The D-team eventually brought out a number of patches in 2012 before being fired by Akella, seemingly without being paid a single ruble for their efforts.

It was due to this dysfunction that Postal III shifted both in style and design from what was originally envisioned by RWS. The free roaming element of missions were still in development around late 2008, before the decision was made to make the game linear (as the Source Engine didn't support level streaming despite Valve at the time claiming it would). Also in an interview, Ex-Trashmasters developer Larissa Davidova said that the open-world and advanced AI laid out in the original design documents by RWS's Steve Wik was too complex to implement, and there are several issues which arose when updating the engine to Source in 2009. Also changed was the Postal Dude's character model, a change which occurred in very early 2010, with its last appearance in an early 2010 video named "Good Path vs. Bad Path" highlighting the moral choices that could be made in-game. The console version of the game (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3), as well as other PC platforms (Mac, Linux) were later also cancelled.

Akella, facing bankruptcy at the time, sought to ship the game in a desperate attempt to make money. It didn't work.

2010 Postal 3 - Amazing GamesCom 2010 Trailer	Promo, also 2010 POSTAL 3 - Psychiatric Evaluation Fail

Release

After the release of Postal III in 2011, Running With Scissors did their best to calm the Postal Community and help them as best they could. While negotiations had broken down between RWS and Akella, it was the refusal of Akella to release the Postal III Source Code that ultimately burned the bridge. After this, RWS disowned the game, removing it from their store. Akella had narrowly averted bankruptcy by selling its unsold games as bank collateral (Seriously) with its vice president blaming its incompetence on the 2008 global economic meltdown, the rise of internet game sales, and the decision to release Postal III. No Shit.

Aftermath

Postal III would later be retconned out of the series' canon in POSTAL 2: Paradise Lost as nothing more than a hallucinatory dream of the Postal Dude during the 11-year time gap between Apocalypse Weekend and Paradise Lost. Still, this has not dissuaded several fans from trying to fix the mess that is Postal III. While the Source Code has yet to be released, the SDK for Postal III was leaked onto the RWS forum along with a NoDRM patch for Windows 8 users who could not launch the game due to the DRM not being fully compatible with the OS.

Additionally, since 2023, RWS later have access to the game store page on Steam after it was initially delisted on Steam back in 2022 due to DRM server shutdown, and release various updates to fix several game bugs (which was possible through the use of DLLs injection), including the grenade crash fix, which was caused by the NoDRM patch, new localization and more, aswell as releasing the game soundtrack on Steam. Russian pre-order exclusive weapons such as Fart Gun were also added to both Steam & Zoom version of the game.

Possible Salvation

In the first ever "I Regret Nothing" podcast, RWS talk openly about the development of Postal III stating that they indeed have the Source Code to Postal III but are unable to do anything much about it as the code is documented in Russian (Ahahaha). However, Vince Desi has placed an open call to any coders who are willing to tackle the mess as it would take a large team to do so. Mike J in contrast states for those still holding onto Postal III to "simply let it go".