Stalker developers are opposed to the term "Eurojank".

Long before words like “AI slop,” “Shovelware,” “Friendslop,” and “Rougelikes” became the dominant nomenclature to describe video games, there was the word “Eurojank,” among others. The word has often been associated with STALKER and Gothic, and has since been used in more modern examples such as the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

Most recently, Marathon's UI added “Fontslop” to the mix of gamer words, and many of the fonts caught people's attention when they were released.

It's full of bugs at its core, but it has a sort of redeeming quality that makes it worth experiencing if you're willing to accept the bugs and half-baked feel that goes into most European-developed games.

It's a SpongeBob window meme, but with a Lethal Company employee looking down at a REPO semibot.

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Wikipedia defines it more specifically: “Video games from Europe (particularly Eastern Europe) have ambitious concepts but poor execution and sometimes unintentional flaws.”

But Andrii Verpakhovskyi, the designer of the original STALKER game, has a problem with the word “Eurojank,” and the developer may have a really solid argument.

We should start classifying Fallout as a Eurojank. Isn't that right?

First discovered by PC Gamer and in an interview with Edge magazine, Verpakhovskyi noted that some of the best games of his era are often janky, buggy messes.

“Some of my favorite games at the time were Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and Arcanum, both made by the core team, Troika Games. [from the] Before that, there were Fallout games,” Verpakhovskyi explained.

And – guess what – it wasn't labeled Eurojank.

“Those games were janky as hell, but they had the same spirit that was in the games described as Eurojank, so I think it’s unfair to geofence the genre,” he added.

Verpakhovskyi also added that the developers of the original STALKER did not directly set out to create “Eurojank.”

“We had no idea that what we were doing was different from people making games outside the post-Soviet space,” he said. “We don’t draw any kind of line between the Japanese games that Nintendo is known for, or the Sega Genesis and the games that come out of the US, Canada, the UK or Western Europe.”

They were just trying to make a good game and they happened to have a bug. This is almost certainly due to a lack of formal game developer training.

“We were all new to the industry and people had no special training in engineering or art,” Verpakhovskyi said.

Considering all this, Verpakhovskyi's words really make sense. Why should Eurojank be limited to European games when games from all backgrounds, including American ones, seem to be riddled with bugs?