It’s not uncommon for Canada to produce a successful video game, the kind mooted as a Game of the Year contender from Day 1. It’s significantly less common when such a game comes not from a development team of thousands of people, but from a single anonymous Saskatchewanian with a day job in IT.

But that’s the story behind Balatro, the breakout indie phenomenon that has sold more than five million copies to date across PC, console and mobile, and has been a life-changing success for its developer, who goes by the pseudonym LocalThunk.

An engrossing and hugely replayable twist on poker, Balatro starts simply, dealing eight cards and asking players to assemble traditional poker hands from them. Better hands with higher numbered cards equal more points.

What makes the game compelling is what happens in between these poker hands, where players use their winnings to buy Joker cards that change the rules and grant various upgrades for specific playing cards and hands. With the right combination of Jokers—for example, one Joker that doubles a hand’s score when it contains a face card, paired with a Joker that makes every card count as a face card—a player can match the game’s ever-escalating point thresholds, unlocking new Jokers, upgrades, and decks with special rules in the process.

Balatro is up for Game of the Year at next week’s D.I.C.E. Awards as well as March’s Game Developers Choice Awards, nominated alongside heavily marketed bigger-budget fare like Microsoft’s new Indiana Jones game, Square Enix’s latest Final Fantasy, and a pair of recent hits from Sony.

Despite the success, and the hype, the way LocalThunk describes Balatro’s origin is positively mundane. “I had about a month of vacation time banked up at my job, and I had to take it off at the end of the year,” he tells The Logic. “So I had basically the entire month of December off. And in Saskatchewan, in December, it’s pretty cold and there’s not much to do.”

For the first year, Balatro was a hobby project, progressing on nights and weekends as LocalThunk was able to find time for it. But then he had to quit his day job as a result of “external circumstances,” and figured he could focus on it full-time for a few months, release it on the PC game storefront Steam, and perhaps use it as a nice portfolio piece for when he applied for jobs at a game development studio. 

Shortly after he put up a “coming soon” store page for Balatro, LocalThunk was contacted by a company interested in publishing the game. Then another. And another. He eventually settled on London-based publisher Playstack, calling it a “no-brainer” decision.

“There were other publishers offering better terms in some things. But the thing that really sold me on Playstack was that it seemed like they really got the game and what I was going for,” LocalThunk says. “It was clear to me that they were more passionate about bringing this thing to market than a lot of the other publishers that I talked to.”While Balatro has been described as a “viral” hit and LocalThunk admits its success has far exceeded his expectations, he says it couldn’t have happened without hard work. “I honestly think any game that achieves this level of notoriety, it doesn’t happen randomly,” he says. “I think it’s like anything. You’ve got to be prepared, and if you do the work, then hopefully it takes off.”

LocalThunk points to two moments that helped Balatro really take off in earnest. First, influencer Dan Gheesling—who has 123,000 subscribers on YouTube—streamed a pre-release demo of the game to his fan base in June 2023, giving it an enthusiastic endorsement. “I remember that was a really big deal. I remember seeing the notification for that on my phone and panicking a little bit,” LocalThunk says.

He didn’t have long to get over that panic before Canadian YouTuber Ryan “Northernlion” Letourneau—who has 1.21 million subscribers—gave Balatro a similarly superlative spotlight a month later.

Getting the game in front of those audiences was essential to making it click with people in a way that traditional screenshots wouldn’t, says Playstack communications director Wout van Halderen. “The biggest struggle for Balatro early on was that assets were not very exciting, so showing people the fun that could be had was a key part of the strategy.”

Another big win for the publisher was a 24-hour Balatro invitational tournament in which six popular streamers competed against one another, with the winner receiving 200 copies of the game to give to their audience. The other five received 100 copies to distribute as a consolation prize.

As attention around the game has expanded, LocalThunk became increasingly grateful for the initial decision to remain anonymous. “I knew how the internet is and I’m really glad that I chose to do this from the start,” he says. “I think it was just kind of a random decision; I didn’t really think about it. And the more time went on, the more I was like, ‘Oh, thank goodness I get to keep low-key.’”

While anonymity has minimized the negative impact of fame on LocalThunk’s day-to-day life and he’s largely happy with Balatro’s success, there are downsides, like limiting his ability to fully participate in the development scene and find community with his peers. “It’s really wonderful, but it also means that it’s a little lonely,” he says.

There’s also a bittersweet element to the Balatro success story. “As more time goes on, I think it’s sinking into me that this is not my thing anymore. It’s gone into just general gaming culture at this point,” LocalThunk says. “It’s not something I ever anticipated or ever thought I would enjoy, seeing other people take my art and then put their spin on it. But it just feels like it’s not mine anymore—in some bad ways, but mostly in good, interesting, cool ways that it’s part of a community.” 

While he clearly values community and collaboration, don’t expect LocalThunk to bring on a team of people to make the next game after Balatro. “I don’t like managing people,” he says. “I like writing really shitty code and drawing stupid playing cards. That’s what I enjoy about this.”

One thing that definitely isn’t in the cards for LocalThunk? Going back to that IT day job. “Game development is basically my entire life now,” he says. “I won’t go back to a normal job, nor do I think I’d really be able to after experiencing this and knowing that I can make games for a living.”