In the span of a few months in 2024, a new indie video game took the world by storm.
[Balatro main theme music]
It’s called Balatro, and lately, everyone seems to be playing it. It became so widespread that even I started to take notice, and I’m the furthest thing from a gamer. So I started to wonder: What is this game? Where did it come from? And how did it get so popular? To answer these questions, I called my go-to gaming expert: my older brother, Alan.
ALAN PASCUA: I love Balatro. I’ve gotten so many people hooked on Balatro. I play it probably at least five times a day. The whole premise of it is similar to like, it’s kind of like a poker offshoot game and it is a roguelike.
I also talked with McCormick senior Colin Schilf, a Game Head for Northwestern’s Esports Club.
COLIN SCHILF: The kind of gambling aspect engages you a lot. There’s a lot of luck involved. But there’s also this category of games called “roguelikes,” which are like, just every run is very different and there’s a lot of different factors that can come together and get you to like a super high score, and I think that’s way more interesting for people.
PASCUA: I love roguelike games, and I started seeing on Twitter a little while ago, like probably about a year ago at this point, screenshots and videos of people playing Balatro and I was like, “Oh, this looks fun.”
SCILF: It just kind of went viral through most gaming channels. There’s a platform called Steam where most people buy their games and it was like the most selling indie game and like the most selling game for like multiple weeks in a row when it came out. So I started playing like a month after it came out, which was March 2024. It wasn’t on phones yet, but after like two more months it was on phones, then it was everywhere.
PASCUA: Yeah, it came out and I was hooked completely. If you want to go down the Balatro wormhole, apart from the gameplay mechanics, the developing story is really interesting. So look up LocalThunk. He created this game solely by himself, like pretty much with no help. He’s also remained completely anonymous, which is cool and hard to do in this day and age.
Taking my brother’s advice, I looked into Balatro’s game developer, LocalThunk, and found that he has, amazingly, stayed anonymous. He’s gone so far as to send other people to accept major awards on his behalf, including an actor dressed up in full costume as Jimbo, the Balatro Joker.
[Youtube clip: “This is WEIRD!” – Balatro Wins Debut Game | BAFTA Games Awards 2025] “Yes, it’s me. That weird live action Jimbo from the Balatro commercial.”
But even though LocalThunk is private about his identity, he has publicly shared a lot of information about Balatro’s development process on his blog, which you can find at localthunk.com. To learn more about what makes Balatro’s journey so special, I talked to Professor Derrick Fields, who teaches courses in Game Design and 3D Modeling at Northwestern.
DERRICK FIELDS: So, it just so happens that I bring up Balatro every now and then, and most recently through a course on video game entrepreneurship. What I latched onto was their whole point for making Balatro was that they were just doing it for their friends. And so what’s special for me and kind of at the core of why I think it’s important to teach games and teach people building out their own ideas, is it’s just an authentic experience and it just so happened to have blown up. It wasn’t strategically developed to be popular online, but that’s the outcome that, you know, we’re all kind of reconciling.
I also asked Professor Fields what they think about the actual design of the game, and why it works so well.
FIELDS: For me it’s sound and like haptics and so, um, I think a game can really get me latched on when I do an action and that action feels good. Playing Balatro like every little motion has a sound to it that just objectively feels really great to hear. It’s almost like, uh, I don’t know, a little bit of card ASMR while you’re playing this game.
Fundamentally what’s really fun about Balatro is the, it’s very low barrier to entry in terms of the accessibility and getting people encouraged to playing it and trying it out. I think a lot of us fundamentally have, you know, a surface level understanding of poker and can therefore be like, okay, I, I think I can do this.
But the other special element is. You know, kind of being able to put your flavor on that game. There’s a bunch of different packs and themes and collaborations with external IPs now that have made the game all the more special. And so, yeah, I think all of it comes together in a really pleasant way.
Even now, over a year after its launch, Balatro remains one of the most popular games on the App Store and Google Play.
SCHILF: It’s cool that it’s so simple and it’s like so addictive to like such a wide audience. I think that’s really special about Balatro.
And I know you’re wondering if, after all this research, I ended up downloading and playing Balatro.
[Balatro main theme music]
And the answer is, of course, yes.
For WNUR News, I’m Sofi Pascua.
Web Sources:
“This is WEIRD!” – Balatro Wins Debut Game | BAFTA Games Awards 2025
