Pronunciation guide: How to say "Balatro"
Dusting off a feature I haven't used in 17 (!) years.
One of the most beloved games on the planet right now is the card-based brain-bender Balatro.
But do you know how to say its name?
At the Game Developers Conference last week, I got an official answer from Naman Budhwar, head of video marketing at Balatro publisher Playstack.
He let me know how Balatro’s anonymous developer, LocalThunk, pronounces it: ”BAH-luh-trow.”
But other variations are accepted! “He doesn’t really mind how people say it,” Budhwar said of LocalThunk.
Have a listen:
I hope you get a kick out of this, though I must admit I’m feeling a little down as I write this. Why? Because I used to run these kinds of “Pronunciation Guide” posts when I was at MTV News, whose website has long been scrubbed. I just checked the Wayback Machine and found that the posts are there, but the audio is inoperable.
I had Reggie Fils-Aimé pronouncing his name, Cory Barlog saying “Kratos,” the designers of Far Cry 2 saying Ubisoft (it’s like “ubiquitous,” they said). I even had trashy film director Uwe Boll explaining how his critics should say his. All gone. (None of those links lead to playable audio, but I’m including them in case someone knows how to salvage them.)
Guess I’ll just have to build up a new set of pronunciation guides here at Game File.
P.S. Balatro’s official trailer, from February 2024, includes the LocalThunk pronunciation. You can hear it below. Does that make this post Old News? Come on, who watched the trailer for Balatro? (Other than the 311k people counted on this YouTube upload.)
I dug around the archive of that Ubisoft pronunciation guide and I don't think there's anything salvageable from Wayback Machine's data.
It seems MTV used some kind of Flash player, and while Wayback Machine does have a Flash emulator (Ruffle), this particular player required extra resources at runtime, which from my limited understanding were pulled from some kind of Java backend applet, as the player references a .jhtml (Java in HTML) config file.
The config file itself was archived and actually has a link to what I suspect was the real video/audio (http://www.mtv.com/player/includes/mediaGen.jhtml?uri=mgid:uma:video:mtv.com:175994), but that one unfortunately wasn't archived.
I've always wondered why Ubisoft is YOO-bee-soft, rather than OO-bee-soft. OO-bee-soft seems more like what a French speaker would say... but that might show how much I know about the French...! I was assuming the vowels were similar to Spanish.