The graphic violence in games has increased little by little over the years. In the 1970s and 1980s many companies had policies that dictated -- along with the limits of early graphics -- that violence be abstract. But some games began to show people fighting each other in a boxing-type rings. Others began to show spilled blood. Among the first games that allowed you to kill made you the hero, running around maze-like worlds killing aliens, monsters or Nazis.
Then Postal came on the market.
Steve Wik, from left, Vince Desiderio, Andrew Hall, J.B. Gore, Mike Jaret and Bill Kunkel are game designers.
(Ariana Eunjung Cha -- The Washington Post)
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The title is a reference to a series of shootings in the 1980s at post offices, although the game does not feature any Postal Service employees. It not only allowed -- but encouraged -- you to be bad by killing people who have done nothing wrong. You played the Dude, a guy who lives in a trailer park.
The game succeeded in part because the violence is accompanied by a perverse sort of humor; the story lines hold a dirty mirror up to America and make fun of everyone, regardless of their race, sex or ethnicity.
The genesis of the game came from Desiderio, son of an Italian immigrant who grew up in Brooklyn and previously worked as a nightclub promoter and financial firm headhunter. He had made a name for himself in the game industry as a developer for educational software for kids, including games featuring Sesame Street and Muppets characters. But sometime in the mid-1990s, he said, he became bored and he and a few of his developers began working on Postal in their free time.
When they finally put it on the market, the game sold 15,000 $50 copies in one week. The company eventually sold more than 1 million copies worldwide, and made several million dollars.
The success of Postal spawned a new generation of games, one whose goal according to psychology researcher Douglas Gentile is "to basically be a sociopath."
The top title in the United States in 2004, with 5.1 million units sold: Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.'s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which allows you to steal cars, kill cops and pick up prostitutes.
Success, though, depends on pushing edge of the envelope.
"The more we play these games the more we get desensitized and then you have to push the boundaries more to get the same shock value," said Gentile, the director of research at the National Institute on Media and the Family in Minneapolis.
