Turns out that Balatro, like Tetris before it, can only be ‘finished’ by scoring so high it crashes the game

Ever wonder how far you can go in Balatro once you get past those first eight antes and enter endless mode? Sure you have. What about once you hit ante 16 and enter the wild reaches of untracked endless mode? Less likely, but you might have made it out there once or twice. Even fewer would be those who have hit an integer so high their game just bugs out and explodes in a big ol’ glitched-white-card-spewing crash.

Well, as proven and viewed widely by streamer Nandre, you can in fact hit Ante 39 and just straight up explode the videogame to win because 1.8e308, the highest number it will track on your machine in the game’s code, isn’t high enough to win the score requirement of that ante. Which is… also higher than the highest number your machine will track, so it just displays as “nan”—programmer speak for “not a number.”

Nandre reached the goal to celebrate everyone’s favorite Roguelike winning at The Game Awards 2024.

This puts Balatro in the distinguished company of other arcade-style games you can’t actually hit the “end” of when playing an endless mode because the score just keeps going on. Tetris, perhaps most famously, is a case of this kind of highest-possible-scoring via breaking the game. The Classic Tetris World Championship keeps an archive of winners for the NES version.

Could you go higher still? Yes, actually you can, because—just like with Tetris ROM hacks—you could mod the game to handle ever-absurdly-higher integers with what I can only assume would be ever-more-absurdly-game-breaking consequences.

Gotta say, though, this makes me want a Balatro championship along the same lines with every play using a fixed seed. Are we doing that yet? Can we do that? We should all do that.

Anyway, if you’re here you probably love Balatro as much as I do and should definitely see these rather unhinged outtakes from the live action Balatro trailer.