"I sent him the video of the score, going, like, screw you. Yeah, I got it!" said Playstack's Wout van Halderen.
When you conquer a tough challenge in a videogame, who do you tell first? Maybe you message a friend who is playing the same game to do a bit of gloating, perhaps post on a subreddit or Discord channel in hopes of some celebratory emojis for your accomplishment, or maybe you just boast proudly about it on social media.
If you’re Wout van Halderen, communications director at Balatro’s publisher, Playstack, you’ve got someone in particular to tell when you utterly thrash Balatro: the game’s creator, LocalThunk.
I got to talk to van Halderen at GDC last month, and while trying to wheedle information out of him about the new jokers in the Balatro 1.1 update, he told me he was eager to see some new jokers because as the rest of us.
“I can’t wait,” van Halderen said. “I can’t wait to play more myself. I’m gold stakes at every level. So I need a challenge again, LocalThunk. Get on it.”
After admitting I haven’t advanced further than purple stakes myself, van Halderen explained the unique position he was in during the early days of Balatro’s release.
“I was in a competition with LocalThunk himself, so when I beat the first gold stakes, I sent him a message, and he’s like, ‘How did you do it already?'” van Halderen said.
“I’m not sure if you tried the Jokerless challenge, that is brutal,” he said, referencing the unthinkably difficult feat of beating the final boss blind without ever using even a single joker (and no, I have not tried it).
“I have the benefit that I can actually message him,” he said. “So when I beat that challenge, I sent him the video of the score, going, like, screw you. Yeah, I got it! And he was mad at me, like, ‘How did you do this so fast?'”
It’s only recently that LocalThunk himself matched van Halderen’s accomplishment: earlier this month he reported that he finally beat his own game on gold stakes, inviting fans to roast him for his strategy (he appears to stick mostly with two pair and the Hanging Chad joker, valid) and stating he still wants to 100% his own game someday.
Hopefully he’s not spending so much time playing Balatro that it’s stopping him from working on it: we’re all eager to see some new jokers, including his own publisher.
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