The poker-inspired video game Balatro has proved wildly popular, winning three prizes at the prestigious 2024 Game Awards, taking both the industry and the creator himself by surprise.SAMUEL CORUM/AFP/Getty Images
One of Canada’s biggest international cultural successes of the past year didn’t play on movie screens or stream on Netflix. It wasn’t for sale in bookstores and will never hang on a gallery wall.
It’s called Balatro, and it’s a video game – one whose maker won’t reveal his name or even the name of the province he lives in, and who says he has mixed feelings about the success of his creation, which has been purchased millions of times since it launched last February.
Balatro is among the most critically and commercially successful games in the world at this moment, but it is not a typical candidate for that status. Although there are always some indie successes in the video-game industry, the titles that are both revered and very popular have tended to be bigger productions made by teams of designers and technicians, often with complex storylines and fast-paced action set pieces.
By contrast, Balatro is a card game, based on a standard 52-card deck. It was built almost entirely by a single pair of hands, and it has no story whatsoever. Its visuals are rendered in hand-drawn pixel art.
Its creator, known publicly only as LocalThunk, a pseudonym he uses online, has said of his whereabouts only that he is originally from Saskatchewan, and that he has since moved elsewhere in Canada.
“I’m a pretty private person,” he explained in a video-call interview, with his camera off. (The Globe and Mail arranged the call through his publisher, which vouched for his identity.) Balatro is not the first game he has made, but it is the first one he has tried to sell. The rest, he said, were hobby projects, not meant for public consumption.
“All the fanfare, I wasn’t expecting any of it. And I don’t know if I enjoy a lot of it either,” he said. “I like seeing people enjoy the game, and that it has reached all these different people. But at the same time, it’s the internet. So, with the good attention, there’s always bad attention, too. It’s been a lot.”
Like most successful art, Balatro (the name is a Latin word for “fool” or “jester”) works within a set of traditions, but blends and innovates upon them in ways that feel fresh.
At its core, it’s video poker – a type of game that has existed, and been popular with casual players, for decades. What makes Balatro unique is the way it crossbreeds the conventions of that genre with some of the best elements of another very old species of video games, and one not as well known to non-enthusiasts: roguelikes.
Roguelikes have existed almost as long as computing equipment has been small enough to fit inside people’s homes. (The genre takes its name from the early-1980s game Rogue.) A classic roguelike puts a player inside a dungeon filled with monsters. The player’s character descends, gathering equipment and magical items along the way and becoming increasingly powerful.
But the monsters also become more powerful, and, when a character dies, all their progress and possessions are permanently lost. Each new game is a fresh start, in an entirely new dungeon with a randomly generated layout.
In Balatro, there is no dungeon. What the game borrows from roguelikes is the concept of magical items and equipment, and the idea of gradual improvement as a way of staving off a return to square one.
The key to survival is using special cards that allow a player to modify the poker deck or alter the rules. At the centre of Balatro’s gameplay are 150 joker cards, each of which has a different effect. Only a few can be owned at a time, and the game offers them up at random between rounds, forcing players to choose which ones to add to their collections.
Balatro’s most exhilarating moments happen when the jokers are working together, reinforcing one another’s powers. Players learn how to overcome the game’s challenges by playing illegal poker hands (pulling off one’s first five of a kind is a milestone) and exploiting technicalities to beat the odds. Clever sound design and subtly surreal artwork make the game compelling. Although there is no story, the ups and downs of each attempt can feel like an emotional ride.
Playstack, Balatro’s Britain-based publisher, says the game has sold more than five million copies across the many platforms for which it is available. Those include all major home video-game consoles, iOS and Android. The game’s purchase price includes everything. There are no in-app purchases, and no gambling with real money.
At the end of last year, it became the first video game by a solo creator to be nominated for game of the year at the Game Awards, the industry’s most widely watched awards gala. Although it didn’t win in that category (it lost to Astro Bot, a Sony game whose production budget was almost certainly in the tens of millions, at least), it did win best independent game, best debut indie game and best mobile game. In the gaming press, it topped many best-of-2024 lists.
At the December Game Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, Balatro’s publisher accepted those honours on its creator’s behalf. LocalThunk was sitting elsewhere in the city’s Peacock Theatre, he said, with his partner beside him. He told no one who he was. “I don’t really like celebrating things myself. But you know, it was cool to see,” he said.
“My partner and I, we just kind of had a little golf clap.”
In his many media interviews over the past few months, he has always refused to give more than a few basic details about his life – a decision that has seemed to fuel curiosity. His reluctance to claim the limelight, he explained, has to do with why he started making games in the first place.
Balatro, he said, was the latest in a decade-long string of hobby projects intended to indulge two of his passions: computer science and visual art. He began working on the game in 2021, he recalled, when his employer at the time insisted he take a few weeks of vacation before the end of the year.
“This is just what I do for fun,” he said. “I just make a game. It might take a week, it might take a month, it might take a few years. It’s fun for me to work on. It recharges my batteries.”
He continued working on Balatro for the next 18 months, he said, a period of time during which he left his job and moved cross-country with his partner. “I was playing the game myself, and I kind of knew what I was looking for. I was just winging it, basically.”
In mid-2023, after receiving positive feedback from friends, he released an early version online. The full version of Balatro launched a few months later and almost instantly gained uptake among the gaming world’s online tastemakers.
According to Playstack’s figures, roughly half of Balatro’s sales have happened since September, when the game launched on mobile platforms. That does not include downloads by people who receive it for free through the Apple Arcade subscription gaming service.
For the time being, LocalThunk said, he’s not interested in joining a game development company, and isn’t sure if he’ll release another game. He’s focused on building add-on content, to keep Balatro players coming back. The game, he said, is now more than a full-time job.
His life, he added, has not transformed. “I do try to travel and visit friends more now. I wouldn’t say things have changed significantly.”
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