Balatro is a deck-building roguelike that’s played by the player playing poker hands to score points in order to defeat “blinds”. Balatro was released last year, and its reinvention of of a classic card game into a roguelike structure has proven to be both a critical and commercial success, selling over half a million copies across all of the formats for which it’s been released, perhaps finding its greatest success as a mobile game for iOS and Android. The game was also crowned “the best game of 2024” by GQ magazine, and it won ‘Game of Year and ‘ Gameplay Design’ awards at The Indie Game Awards 2024, as well as being nominated for ‘Game of the Year’ at The Game Awards 2024, and as we previously reported, someone’s even managed to run Doom on it (because of course they have!) Soon, Commodore 64 owners could get the chance to enjoy the poker-based roguelite experience of Balatro, as the C64 developer Kornel Kolma is currently porting Balatro to 8-bit Commodore home computers including the Commodore 64, C Plus/4, and CBM PET.

Unusually, the developer is aiming for the C64 version of Balatro to be an official release, rather than a homebrew version, and Balatro’s original developer (Localthunk) and publisher (Playstack) have been contacted to seek permission to make the C64 version of Balatro official.

All being well, there are plans for a physical release of Balatro for Commodore 64 from retro game publisher PleasureBytes. You can follow the progress of Balatro for 8-bit Commodore machines on the game’s itch.io page.