Slashdot Mirror
Postal Wins Court Case Brought by USPS
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out a press release announcing Postal developer Running With Scissors has been ruled victorious in a court case brought by the United States Postal Service. This seems to be the culmination of a trademark suit which began in 1997 after the release of the original Postal, as the USPS commented "All of us at the Postal Service have a sense of humor, but there is nothing funny about your game 'Postal'", and then tried to prove the Postal Service has a proprietary use of the word 'Postal'. Running With Scissors have fun with this legal resolution: "With unlimited financial resources comes unlimited ego. POSTAL and POSTAL 2 represent everything the USPS isn't: a successful private enterprise that will never have to rely on an irrevocable government contract to keep its pockets perpetually lined with cash."
The game Postal was named such so as to be like the phrase "going postal", which generically refers to getting angry to the point of snapping, sometimes resulting in violence.
The term stemmed from a rash of violent incidents in which postal workers came into their office (their post office) and would shoot up the place - sometimes due to inane stress levels and buracracy, other times because of being fired.
Why this happened mostly in post offices is anyone's guess, but the aforementioned buracracy, the pre-email volumes of mail causing stress, and the fact that since it was a government institution, striking was illegal.
Ergo, the game Postal took its name from a slang term, which took its name from the office where workplace violence was more or less common, and the reasons stemmed from the USPS themselves.
In short, it's the USPS' fault that the game got named that way. This is no different than Google trying to sue for the use of the slang term "google", except that Google's repsonse time is quicker. Oh, and no one gets killed when you go google.
Schnapple