Historian Kevin Impellizeri shares a story of a video game controversy to his friends: Elford Stephens and Phil Thomas. In today's episode, we examine the aggressively controversial 1997 "murder simulator" Postal. We talk about the history of creator Running with Scissors, their aggressive attempts to spark a controversy and the ways they have massaged the truth about the impact of their supposed "software trauma of a game."

Topics discussed include: how a company went from making games based on Sesame Street to one where you mow down entire towns worth of people, the history of "going Postal," and how has Running with Scissors stayed in business for so long???

More information on the history of "going postal":
DeLani R. Bartlette, "The Origin of 'Going Postal,'" Medium, June 29, 2020: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-origin-of-going-postal-90992ce6fa6a.
Aaron Gordon, "The Legacy of Going Postal," Vice,  September 24, 2020: https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5pabb/the-legacy-of-going-postal.

Content warning: discussion of mass shootings.

Also, check out Noah Caldwell Gervais' overview of the entire Postal series: https://youtu.be/kivtv6wabBk.

Theme Music: Occam's Sikhwee by Sikh Knowledge (Free Music Archive: https://bit.ly/33G4sLO), used under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US (https://bit.ly/33JXogQ) 
More info, including show notes and sources at http://scandalousgamespodcast.wordpress.com.