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By any measure, Balatro is a phenomenon. A weird little indie card game that came out of nowhere in 2023, it earned rave reviews when it launched in early 2024, claimed our Game of the Year crown, and has some of the biggest developers and publishers in the world lining up to get in on the action.
Today, a little over a year after its release, developer LocalThunk has shared the official “Balatro Timeline,” a detailed and surprisingly dramatic rundown of how it all came to be (including, in case you were curious, the origins of his name) that’s also just a straight ton of fun to read.
The timeline begins in December 2021, when LocalThunk decided to burn three weeks of holiday time “to work on some kind of project.” CardGame, the “production working folder for all Balatro source code,” was created on December 20, 2021, and has never been renamed.
A month later, “My vacation is over, but I am now fully immersed and obsessed,” LocalThunk wrote. “This is my favourite feeling in the world. When I was back in university I would routinely stay up until the wee hours of the morning working on my weird game projects and greet my parents while they made their morning coffee. I got back into this groove and starting in January I was hooked.”
From there, the timeline follows the creation of Balatro, and LocalThunk’s life around it, through a series of highs and lows: The search for a publisher, slow but growing interest in the game among YouTubers and streamers, the impact on LocalThunk’s physical and mental health, the near-certainty that something would go catastrophically wrong at the last second, and the shock when it didn’t: I am admittedly biased, but his retelling of the reaction to Balatro reviews is one of my favorite segments.
“February 19th rolls around,” LocalThunk wrote. “The 19th is the review embargo day, and Playstack did a truly exceptional job getting this game in the hands of traditional media to write their reviews before launch. I didn’t know what to expect, this was a pretty weird game after all. Average ratings of 6 or 7?
“The first big review is from PC Gamer: 91. Playstack and I are on a call when they break the news to me, and I can tell they are pretty shocked. I am shocked. That rating doesn’t make any sense.”
The Balatro Timeline serves up some interesting insights into indie game development, but it’s also just an incredibly entertaining read. Even though we know the outcome, there’s a tangible sensation of rising excitement and pressure as the story progresses, and when LocalThunk writes that Balatro’s sales numbers on launch day “made no sense,” it comes across not as false modesty but genuine surprise: “This was meant for just a few of my friends and yet somehow all these strangers chose to buy it.”
“All these strangers,” indeed: Balatro surpassed five million copies sold in January.
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Kurt Indovina
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