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Balatro creator LocalThunk stays so anonymous, a GDC attendee couldn't believe how he 'crushed' the roguelike's base difficulty: ''Wow you must have played this before!''
Balatro's anonymous creator, LocalThunk, secretly played their own award-nominated game at GDC, fooling onlookers with their skill on the challenging 'white stake' difficulty. The game's unexpected success, with 5 million sales, has even earned it GOTY recognition from Baldur's Gate 3's director.
There are, of course, many benefits to maintaining anonymity in our increasingly exposed, digitized world. Remaining under-the-radar affords you privacy to exist more peacefully, or, if you're pseudonymous Balatro creator LocalThunk, it allows you to sneak into your own GDC demo booth like a little rat in a pizza parlor.
"One of my fav moments from GDC," LocalThunk says in a series of posts on Bluesky. "They had a booth set up to play Balatro since it was an award nominee. I watched for a bit, then I gave it a go myself."
"Crushed a white stake run," LocalThunk continues, referring to the poker roguelike's punishing "white stake" difficulty. While it's Balatro's lowest-ranking difficulty, white stakes still provoke some players to the point where their struggles have become worthy of parody to real Balatro heads.
So LocalThunk walked away from his successful GDC demo run with the swagger of someone who just instigated a missile crisis, I'm assuming, causing an onlooker to approach him "as I was about to leave," LocalThunk says on BlueSky.
"'Wow, you must have played this before!'" he recalls them saying.
"'I guess you could say that,'" he replied demurely.
"Also, this was actually the first and only time I have seen strangers play my game in real life," LocalThunk continues. "Have yet to see Balatro in the wild. So as far as I'm concerned y'all are just Truman Show-ing me." If you ask me, considering Balatro's verifiably wild success since its 2024 release, we're in more of a Batman situation. Look, here come 200 Jokers.