Balatro’s first demo could be edited with Notepad to unlock the whole game—the solution? ‘Bury it as soon as possible’ with a ‘newer, shinier version’

Balatro, as you might have heard, is a bit of a popular videogame. Just a smidge. Having tidied away over 3 million units and snagging Game Awards wins by virtue of being a really solid little card roguelike. I know this because I blinked and it had stolen 46 hours of my life—and, to several other members of the PC Gamer team, those look like rookie numbers.

But it had a bit of a fumbling start, according to Wout Van Halderen, the communications director at Playstack, the game’s publisher. During a talk at GDC, Halderen admitted that when its first demo came out, you could, uh. Just unlock the full game by editing a file in Windows Notepad. Oops.

“You could only play 50 rounds back in the first demo. So if you played the rounds, it was cut off, and the demo was over. And people would use all those 50 rounds, they played five to six hours … You could use Notepad to [adjust some code and unlock] the entire game.”

As you might imagine, this sort of frightened the bejeezus out of everyone working on the thing: “This is kind of scary, but at the same time, you see the effort to crack your game and pull [exploits] because they want [to play] it so much. That was nice.”

PC Gamer’s own Tim Clark then proceeded to ask Halderen in a Q&A about the whole notepad incident, and while the team doesn’t have the numbers, they “did see it pop up online, pirated, on websites where [you could download] the cracked version.” So, what’s an indie developer without an army of lawyers or anything to do?

“We did want to bury it as soon as possible, because the whole game was available … So making sure there was a newer, shinier version of the game too—it was very important to do that quick, and to make sure it was better than the cracked version.”

And that’s pretty much what happened, with a demo that lured players back into a version of the game that wasn’t crackable by moving a few letters around in a raw text document, circa September 2023.

Still, Halderen maintains it was a “sign of health for how many people wanted to play the whole thing. But that was not the experience we wanted them to have, so we gave them something shinier, something newer with the demo.” It’s safe to say that very much paid off. We gave it Game of the Year, after all.