Hollow Knight: Silksong will arrive seven years after the first game. Why? That’s what fans have been impatiently wondering for a while now. According to the developers at Team Cherry, there was no major drama or development snafus. Seven years is just how long it takes to make the Metroidvania Soulslike sequel to what some fans regard as one of the best games of the last decade.
“I remember at some point I just had to stop sketching,” cofounder Ari Gibson told Bloomberg in a new interview. “Because I went, ‘Everything I’m drawing here has to end up in the game. That’s a cool idea, that’s in. That’s a cool idea, that’s in.’ You realize, ‘If I don’t stop drawing, this is going to take 15 years to finish.’”
What began as DLC for 2017’s surprise Steam hit Hollow Knight eventually morphed into a full-fledged standalone game. Team Cherry officially revealed Silksong would become a sequel in 2019. The developers told Bloomberg they wanted to keep their team size small so as not to disrupt the creative flow responsible for the first game. But growing scope—bigger boss fights, multiple towns, a denser world—meant it would take even longer to finish, especially if it would exude the same level of tight controls, visual polish, and world-building mystery of the original Hollow Knight.
When Microsoft doubled down in 2022 on the promise that Silksong would arrive within the year, that was apparently the actual goal. “We did genuinely believe that was the case,” cofounder William Pellen confirmed. “There was a period of two to three years when I thought it was going to come out within a year.” The team just kept biting off more than it could chew while also calmly ignoring all of the online chatter about unhinged fans.
“I think we’re always underestimating the amount of time and effort it’ll take us to achieve things,” Gibson told Bloomberg. “It’s also that problem where, because we’re having fun doing it, it’s not like, ‘It’s taking longer, this is awful, we really need to get past this phase.’ It’s, ‘This is a very enjoyable space to be in. Let’s perpetuate this with some new ideas.’”
It seems to have helped that the original Hollow Knight has now sold 15 million copies, Team Cherry revealed. Silksong is already Steam’s most-wishlisted game. If it lives up to even a fraction of the hype, the team won’t be forced to release their next game any time soon, either.
