Video games, or more so the people who play them, I suppose, have this annoying thing where they assign a genre name as an insult. I don’t want to reignite the discourse around JRPG as a term, but it certainly was used in quite a derisive and othering manner in its earlier years. The term walking sim was used more as a point of ironic degradation, even though it was perfectly apt in many ways. Then there’s Eurojank, a sort of real but not technically real genre that describes ambitious but imperfect games made by European developers. And Andrii Verpakhovskyi, designer on the original Stalker games, doesn’t think such jank should be geologically categorised.
“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,” Verpakhovskyi told Edge magazine in a recent interview (via PC Gamer). 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.”
Eurojank is more something that was foisted upon the games that Verpakhovskyi and co were making at the time. “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 explained. “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.” Verpakhovskyi noted that the devs working on Stalker were all newcomers to the industry, with many not trained in engineering or art. So really, no wonder the games came out imperfect in places.
Verpakhovskyi’s comments are genuinely a good opportunity to reflect on how we name genres. The genres I mention at the start of this article didn’t appear from a place of love, generally, even if they’ve been reappraised to a degree. I myself love a walking sim, will partake in a JRPG, and have a deep admiration for jank of any affiliation. But perhaps we could afford to think more about how with make assumptions of games from certain regions. Just a thought!
