There's nothing 'euro' about 'eurojank,' says Stalker dev—after all, what are some of the 2000s' best RPGs if not beautiful all-American jankfests?

A lot of my favourite games ever made fall under the expansive rubric of "eurojank." Stalker, the first Witcher, Mount & Blade—the list goes on. But maybe it's a little unfair to confine the jank phenomenon exclusively to Europe. After all, what is 2004 RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which is still getting fan patches 22 years later, if not a prime cut of jank?

So says Andrii Verpakhovskyi, designer on the original Stalker games, in a recent interview in Edge magazine. "Some of my favourite games back in the day were Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and Arcanum, both built by Troika Games, which was the core team [from the] Fallout games before them.

"Those games were janky as hell, but they had this same soul that was in games described as Eurojank, which is why I think it’s unfair to kind of geofence the genre." The man has a point!

Eurojank is, as a pseudo-genre category, refers to a bunch of systems-heavy and ambitious games that tend to originate in Central and Eastern Europe. They often do things that no other game you've ever played even tries, but—owing to a lack of resources—they're also often crammed to bursting with weird and hilarious bugs.

Back when Verpakhovskyi and co were working on those original Stalkers, they didn't really think of themselves as making a particularly regional sort of game. "We had absolutely no notion that what we were doing we were doing differently from people building games outside of the post-USSR space. We never even drew any kind of lines between Japanese games of Nintendo fame or Sega Genesis, and the games that came out of the US, Canada, the UK and western Europe."

They were just devs making games and experimenting along the way. "We were all newcomers to the industry and people were not even specifically trained in engineering or arts." Which perhaps explains some of Stalker's myriad quirks better than the place it came from.

And while you and I might use jank as a loving term, to describe those games with lofty systemic ambitions that end up butting against the limits of a developer's budget or technological capacity, it can sometimes be an insult used by those who lack vision. "I feel like Steam especially now has smothered creativity with how rigidly titles need to fit into a specific orthodoxy," Greg Pryjmachuk, founder of Minskworks and dev behind Jalopy, told Edge. "Anything that doesn’t colour within the established genre lines is quickly punished."

Not here, mind you. At launch, 2024's Stalker 2 kept aloft the janky banner of its forebears. I loved it, and wrote as much in our Stalker 2 review.