Why Balatro’s developer stays anonymous

Balatro just won four Game Developers Choice Awards, including Game of the Year, but the person who made the game wasn’t on stage to accept them.

Instead, Playstack communications director Wout van Haldren spoke on behalf of Balatro’s developer, who goes by the alias LocalThunk, each time the game won an award. “The team does that to give LocalThunk the freedom to work in the style that he likes, which we respect,” Playstack marketing director Liz Cheng-Moore tells The Verge. “That’s our job,” van Haldren adds.

It’s an arrangement that the Playstack team figured out with LocalThunk ahead of other ceremonies like The Game Awards, where Balatro won three awards and was nominated for Game of the Year. LocalThunk didn’t want to be public, but he also didn’t want to be disrespectful to fans and the industry, so now the Playstack team accepts his awards on his behalf.

LocalThunk was at the Game Developers Conference this week meeting with other developers, but van Haldren and Cheng-Moore think he’ll generally remain anonymous to the public. It’s not that he wants to be the next Banksy, Cheng-Moore says. He just prefers not to be in the spotlight.

His mysteriousness extends to how he communicates with the team and makes games. For example, Cheng-Moore tells me that his recent blog was something that he talked about one day and launched the next. “It’s fully done by him,” Cheng-Moore says.

And with Balatro’s upcoming gameplay update, which is set to launch sometime this year, “I think he’s just going to surprise us one day and he’s going to say, ‘hey, here’s the 1.1 build,’”van Haldren says. “I think he works best with that freedom, because that’s how he made Balatro in the first place. He had no timelines, no stress. He could just tinker, and that’s how the magic happened.”

van Haldren adds that “I have not seen a single thing so far that he’s working on. And I kind of like it because I’ll be surprised as well.”