Long before words like “AI slop,” “Shovelware,” “Friendslop,” and “Rougelikes” became the dominant forms of nomenclature to describe video games, there was one word that ruled above all, “Eurojank.” That word has often been associated with the likes of STALKER and Gothic, and has since been used for more modern examples like the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
Most recently, we added “Fontslop” to the mix of gamer words after Marathon’s UI and many fonts had people rolling their eyes at launch.
At its core, it’s been used for, mostly, European, developed games that are riddled with bugs but often have some sort of redeeming quality that makes them worth experiencing, provided that you’re willing to accept the bugs and half-baked feel.
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Wikipedia defines things more specifically as: “Video games from Europe (especially Eastern Europe) with ambitious concepts but lacking in execution and sometimes exhibiting unintended glitches.”
However, Andrii Verpakhovskyi, a designer on the original STALKER games, has an issue with the word “Eurojank,” and the developer might have a really solid point.
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As first spotted by PC Gamer, and as part of an interview with Edge magazine, Verpakhovskyi noted how some of the best games from his era were often janky, buggy messes.
“Some of my favorite 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,” Verpakhovskyi explained.
And — guess what — they weren’t labeled Eurojank.
“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,” he added.
Verpakhovskyi further noted that the developers behind the original STALKER didn’t outright set out to create “Eurojank.”
“We had absolutely no notion that what we were doing we were doing differently from people building games outside of the post-USSR space,” he said. “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 trying to make a good game, and it just so happened to be buggy, which could almost certainly be attributed to the lack of formal game developer training.
“We were all newcomers to the industry and people were not even specifically trained in engineering or arts,” Verpakhovskyi said.
When you consider all that, Verpakhovskyi really does have a point. Why does Eurojank have to be limited to just European games, when bugs are seemingly riddled in games of all backgrounds, including American ones?
- Released
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2024
- ESRB
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m
- Developer(s)
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GSC Game World
- Publisher(s)
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GSC Game World
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 5
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