Earlier today, Team Cherry finally announced a release date for its long-awaited Hollow Knight sequel Silksong. After seven years, it will finally be out next month.
Yet contrary to what you may believe, Silksong hasn’t been in development hell for that time. Instead, Team Cherry’s developers were just having too much fun making it.
In fact, sales of the original game have skyrocketed from 2.8m copies to 15m copies since Silksong’s announcement in 2019, giving the studio the financial freedom to take their time.
Hollow Knight: Silksong – Special AnnouncementWatch on YouTube
What was originally intended as an expansion to Hollow Knight soon ballooned into its own game, with the studio announcing in February 2019 it would be a full sequel.
“Even at that point we were recognising that it was going to become another giant thing to rival the scale of Hollow Knight or probably exceed it,” Team Cherry co-founder Ari Gibson told Bloomberg. “And then because of how we work, obviously the world ended up being just as big or bigger. And the quest system existed. And the multiple towns existed. Suddenly you end up six, seven years later.”
“It was never stuck or anything,” Gibson added. “It was always progressing. It’s just the case that we’re a small team, and games take a lot of time. There wasn’t any big controversial moment behind it.”
That 12m rise in sales of the original Hollow Knight is extraordinary. Somehow, Team Cherry inadvertently created the ultimate hype machine: hype for the sequel led to sales for the original, which meant it could take longer to develop, which fed the hype even more due to silence, which became a meme, which meant it could take even longer.
“We’re very lucky in that regard,” said Gibson. “I don’t ever really think about it that much. Maybe that’s the privilege of it.”
No strict deadline and a flood of financial income meant Team Cherry could take its time. It’s in stark contrast to so many other studios at the moment hell-bent on chasing trends and generating cash in the face of rising development costs, which has inevitably resulted in the mass layoffs across the industry in the last couple of years.
By contrast, Team Cherry has remained lean. What’s more, it’s spent the past seven years enjoying development.
“We’ve been having fun,” said Gibson said. “This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It’s nice to make fun things.
“We’re very fortunate that we have a development method that is so enjoyable,” Gibson continued. “Not exactly sure how we stumbled into that. Everything comes together quickly. You can see results fast. Ideas turn into something that exist in the game almost immediately before your eyes, and that’s very satisfying. And that allows you to go off on those tangents and meet weird characters because someone’s off-handedly mentioned a weird character as an idea and the other person’s laughed, and that’s enough.”
Will Silksong push the Metroidvania genre to new heights? | Image credit: Team Cherry
“You’re always working on a new idea, new item, new area, new boss,” added co-founder William Pellen. “That stuff’s so nice. It’s for the sake of just completing the game that we’re stopping. We could have kept going.”
Add to that a desire for exceptional polish, and it’s easy to see how development could have continued even longer.
“I think we’re always underestimating the amount of time and effort it’ll take us to achieve things,” said Gibson. “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.'”
“There’s a level of finish that has to be met throughout the entire game,” added Pellen. “All the way the systems interact, all the hidden work that pops up later on. It’s multiplicative. As you add stuff, the process of tying it all back together just increases.”
Of course, it remains to be seen whether Silksong will fully live up to the hype, but with its release date of 4th September it won’t be long until we find out. At the least, it follows games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as a project with a relatively small team and a huge amount of passion finding big success, where so many AAA studios and publishers have stumbled.