Balatro might be best known as “the poker roguelike,” but poker wasn’t the game creator LocalThunk had in mind when he first started developing it, rather a made-up variation of another card game he and his friends played “thousands” of times.
In a new blog post, LocalThunk talks about how “playing cards have always been a part of my life,” noting that he thinks he’s “played playing card games for far more hours than I have played video games.” While he discusses plenty of card games that he’s played over the years, he proclaims that “the most important game of them all has to be Big Two, or the variant my friends and I made up called Big Cheat.”
Last year, LocalThunk told PC Gamer that Balatro was “more based on Big Two” than poker, but he now explains that his own variant “had some pretty wacky rules and a lot of bluffing,” and he played it “absolutely all the time” with his friends. He continues: “I would get dropped off at school about an hour early every morning and my friends and I would play Big Two to pass the time before the bell rang for our first class. Throughout high school and into university, me and my two closest friends would head to our local Tim Hortons multiple nights a week to get a coffee, shoot the shit, and play Big Cheat. We must have played thousands of games together. This game is what I was trying to recreate when I first started working on Balatro in the midst of the pandemic.”
Big Two and Big Cheat weren’t Balatro’s only inspirations, of course. Not long ago, LocalThunk spoke about the impact of solitaire, which he stated was arguably “the most important” inspiration behind his game, which in itself, it can be debated, is “technically a solitaire game.”
The developer also recently outlined a retrospective timeline of Balatro’s development, in which he revealed that he only started playing his own hit roguelike properly around a week before it actually released, at which point he realized “it’s actually fun.” He reflected: “I have a pretty emotional moment where I feel like I did the thing I set out to do. Finally. I made the fun game I wanted to make.” This hits harder knowing the history he had with the game he was initially trying to recreate, and especially considering that, to him, “playing cards were a tool used to spend time with the people that I love most in the world.”
