How Mina The Hollower Became A 'Make Or Break' Moment For Yacht Club Games

Hello. Today I want to talk about Mina the Hollower, the best rated game of 2026, at least so far. It has a 92 on Metacritic and has been receiving rave reviews from critics and players, which are well deserved. I played it, I loved it. I can talk about that a little bit more later. This is a 2D action platformer, kind of a mix of Zelda, Link's Awakening, and Bloodborne, and Castlevania, and it is developed by an independent studio in California called Yacht Club Games. But Mina the Hollower, as you might have seen over the last few months, is a quote make or break game for Yacht Club. And I know that because I was told that and wrote about it for a Bloomberg Businessweek article that I will link in this YouTube description with a gift link so you can read it without a paywall. Um and I went and visited them to talk about the development of Mina the Hollower, which was turbulent to say the least. It took them 6 years to make, uh much longer

than their previous games, and they've gotten to the point where they are not in dire straits, but certainly reliant upon this game to be a hit. If this game is not a hit, Yacht Club, which has about 15 employees, will have to rethink the way it works in the future. It will have to cut costs, it will have to find funding elsewhere, it will have to make some big moves. So how did we get here? How did we get to the point where Mina the Hollower, where this one game, this one 2D mouse game has become such a high-stakes release for Yacht Club? Well, to tell that story, I want to tell the entire story of Yacht Club Games from the very beginning, much of which I actually documented in my first book, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. So I'm going to read a couple quotes from there, uh some good ones in there, and I'll tell the story of Yacht Club Games. So we're going to start at the beginning. So let's go back to 2012. It's 2012 and uh a group of guys is working for a company called WayForward.

WayForward, if you're not familiar, is a long-running game studio. Um they were known, at least back then, they were primarily known for making licensed games in franchises like Batman and Thor and Contra and Boy and His Blob. They made a lot of retro-style games, a lot of platformers, a lot of games that people appreciated. They were never quite uh 90-plus Metacritic top-tier games, but they were always pretty solid. And this group of guys is designer Sean Velasco, programmers Ian Flood and David DeAngelo, and artist Nick Wozniak. They meet each other at WayForward, and they find that they really enjoy working together. Um but unfortunately for them, WayForward has this policy where instead of keeping teams together because they're kind of a a work-for-hire studio that has to juggle a lot of contracts and be able to in order to stay afloat. They're not the type of studio, at least at this point, they're not the type of studio that is just making their own games and having a a team that all works together and and does all things on their games. Instead,

they're more of kind of a factory might be a demeaning way to put it, but maybe that's also the best way to put it. They're they're mercenaries. And so, they move people around depending where they're needed. And their thought is, "Hey, if we have top performers, we can move them to different teams and they'll help influence other people." Um but for these guys, uh I'm going to read a great quote from here. For these guys, they actually want to stick together. They want to keep working together. Um they have really good chemistry. They really enjoy working together. Uh Sean Velasco gave me this quote. This is from Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. He said, "I always use the analogy of the Star Wars R2 unit. Uh the R2-D2, etc. Luke doesn't wipe R2, and so they work really well and really closely together. At WayForward, they would wipe the R2 unit every time, and so you never got a chance to really get a level that level of cohesion. That's an important fact that I I to to put a pin in for a second, but think about that as we're talking, cohesion and chemistry and team teams working together and learning how to be really good together. So, anyway,

so these guys, they wind up meeting for lunch one day and talking about like game ideas and they come up with this game that they start calling Shovel Knight, which is essentially the structure of Mega Man where you're you're fighting eight bosses combined with um the uh built around the the downward sword stabbing mechanic from Zelda II, uh the Adventure of Link, kind of the black sheep Zelda game, the platformer Zelda game on the NES. And they come up with this idea. Over this one lunch, they like outline much much of what this game would ultimately become, like a bunch of different knights that that Shovel Knight would fight and then like they draw the silhouette of Shovel Knight at this lunch. And they wind up going away for it and saying, "Hey, we want to make original games here." But WayForward is not into the idea. So, they all decide, "You know what? We're going to quit and go indie and start a Kickstarter and try to make this thing ourselves." They launch a Kickstarter, um after a slow start, it winds up getting some attention and ultimately raising more than $300,000, which is more than they had asked for. They asked for $75,000, way way way

beyond their goals. Um and they wind up quitting and starting this new company, Yacht Club, which is kind of ironically named because they see themselves as this really grassroots, like working out of an apartment, uh just have no money, so they're like, "Yacht Club, that sounds fancy." And they call themselves Yacht Club Games. Um and they spend the next year and a half or so working on Shovel Knight. The game actually is delayed. They wind up running out of money during those last 3 months of development. They uh are don't have the money to pay themselves, so they just have to live off of their savings and whatever else they can scrounge up and uh go through some really brutal crunch along the way that I think really takes a lot out of them. Um I have a story from Sean Velasco in Boss Rush in Pixels where he talks about how like the his lowest point was he went out to buy some coffee creamer and he like hands the guy his debit card and the guy's like sorry your card was declined and so he pulls out his credit card and he hands him that and the guy's like no sorry that's declined too and like he winds up leaving this gas station just in shame

not being able to buy coffee creamer for himself. They come out with the game in 2014. It's really well received. People love it and it sells quite well. It does really well for them and finally they can they can take a little break. They can pay themselves decent salaries. They're in much better shape. But something interesting happens at this point which is they are on the hook for creating boss campaigns. They had promised during the Kickstarter as some of the stretch goals that they would make playable versions of some of the bosses that you fight. Specifically Plague Knight, Specter Knight, and King Knight which are bosses in the original Shovel Knight game. And they being the ambitious game creators they are who like subverting expectations and doing things that they hope players will they hope will surprise and delight players. They wind up turning each of these into its own standalone game with an own its own suite of levels and mechanics and new ideas. But because they're Kickstarter goals

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Yacht Club decides perhaps not the best business decision but winds up giving these games away for free to anyone who owns Shovel Knight. They just felt like that was the right thing to do and hopefully they hope that it would bolster Shovel Knight sales along the way. Eventually later on they would they would change up the structure a little bit and and sell Shovel Knight independently and then sell an entire compilation called Treasure Trove that was a little more expensive but anyone who bought the original Shovel Knight would get these games for free. So over the next five years they wind up making these I guess expansions but really brand new games that are just in the Shovel Knight universe. Um Plague Knight which is really cool, Specter Knight, and then King Knight which are all awesome. They're all really good. Like these are all really good stand alone games that just get better and better as they go as the Seama Yacht Club keeps learning how to work together and get better and better and just like learning more and more about how design how to design games and how to how to subvert expectations and surprise players. So in 2019 they finally shipped the

final campaign King Knight and they're all trying to figure out what to do next and there are two ideas that emerge. One is this idea of taking Shovel Knight 3D. They had always thought of Shovel Knight as this icon as this legendary character that they wanted to be this massive franchise like their version of Mario and they had accomplished that in some ways. I mean he was he made cameo appearances in other games. He got an amiibo. He was a an assist trophy in Super Smash Brothers. I mean this was like really impressive stuff and obviously the games itself themselves sold really well. Shovel Knight I believe sold more than 3 million copies as a compilation. So that was one idea was to take Shovel Knight from his NES/SNES era to the N64 era and make him 3D. The other idea was to do a 2D game a smaller project and this guy Alec Faulkner who had joined Yacht Club as an intern and then became a designer. He had come up with this idea this prototype where you have this 2D aesthetic this kind of Link's Awakening style world and map and

in it is a little mouse who can jump and then if you hold the jump button she will burrow burrow into the ground and stay underground for a few seconds and then like shoot right up out of the ground and jump a little higher. And as people at Yacht Club were playing that and looking at it they were like holy crap this is just like such a fun mechanic we could do so many cool things with this. Let's make this our next big or let's make this our next game not our next big game but our next game and let's make it a small side project and get this done like within the next year or two while we work on 3D Shovel Knight. And so Alec and a couple other people wind up working on Mina, what would be called Mina the Hollow Earth for a little while and they hope to make it within a year or two. But then a couple things happened. One is March 2020 rolls around and a pandemic disrupts everybody's lives including game development everywhere Yacht Club Games notwithstanding. So that has an impact on things. The other

thing that happens is that the team realizes that this game is much bigger than they thought that this this open world kind of Zelda style 2D game is growing beyond their expectations and they have so many fun ideas that they can add to it and it's just getting way too big. They also realize that making this kind of game is significantly different than making Shovel Knight games. And here's where you have to kind of put your designer hat on for a second. As a player, I think anyone who has experienced a game like this is just like oh okay. Think about Shovel Knight versus Mina, right? If you've had a chance whether or not you've had a chance to play Mina think about a game like it where it's kind of a 2D top-down Zelda style game, right? So you go in Shovel Knight and you just kind of play it. You jump and you smash and you you dig and you hop and you just play it. You go in a game like Mina and you also you just play it. But if you think about the way that you're actually controlling it if you just kind of zoom out for a second and think about it. In Shovel Knight you are

moving in two directions left or right and then you are jumping over pits and you are kind of thinking about what is in immediately in front of you. Whereas in a Zelda style game like Mina you are moving in four directions. You can move up, left, right, or down which might not sound like a lot but if you think about the real estate of the screens and the number of ways you can go and the number of things you can do that is essentially doubling your number of potential actions which means that you have to think about it from a designer's perspective in a whole new light. You have to think about not only um what what you can see on the bottom of your screen because you're avoiding pits and jumping or whatever in those two directions, you also have to think about what's on top of your screen, what's to the left, what's to the right, what's above you, what's below you. There's just a whole new dimension that you have to think about that these guys, I mean, hadn't done before at least hadn't done in recent times. So, that added a whole new layer of complexity to it. There was also the fact that Alec Faulkner, who had been an intern and was a designer for only a couple of years, didn't have

much leadership experience, which I think hurt the team, led to some problems, led to some uh kind of cohesion problems, relationship problems. Um but I think that the kind of the fatal mistake and one that Yacht Club will will not repeat anytime soon was splitting the team. Because if you remember, one of the reasons that they left WayForward was because their team kept getting split up and they couldn't really take advantage of that chemistry and that cohesion that they'd built. And here, after many years of Shovel Knight, they decided to do the same thing again, which granted they had very good reasons to do that. They thought Mina would just be a small thing, they wanted to work on their big 3D thing, and they also they wanted to uh simultaneously keep Shovel Knight going while also explore new franchises. If if Shovel Knight was their Mario, they saw Mina as their Zelda. They wanted to be like Nintendo, have these big cool franchises that really just kind of were were ubiquitous in in players' minds. So, there were good reasons for making that move, for splitting the team, but it led to problems. And by 2024, by the time Mina had been in development for four years

and was really floundering, really struggling to find itself, the team realized the the founders at Yacht Club realized, "Hey, we need to all work together on this thing." And so, what they did was they actually shelved 3D Shovel Knight, they put that on hold, and they put everybody on Mina, pretty much everybody. I think maybe they had one like 3D programmer still working on the 3D game, but for the most part, everybody's on Mina, including all the founders. And from there, they had to take some more time, they actually laid people off because uh of financial reasons. I'll get into those in a sec, but they had to take some time to like redo all the levels or most of the levels, rethink a lot of things, do a lot of just kind of redesigning of the way that the game worked, which is one of the which is the main reason that it took so long. It's It's really those hiccups. They also had to relearn how to build that chemistry and how all They were now 15 people growing from five when they were working on Shovel Knight. They had to relearn how to work together and how to redevelop that chemistry and develop that chemistry with new people and figure out how to talk to each other.

It's really interesting. In Button Pixels, I talk about how the four co-founders who are still there, there were more than four original co-founders, but there were four of them still there. They had this kind of what they called a mind meld together where they could really just like understand what one another were thinking and and acting and like how they were going to operate and they just worked extremely well together. And I think when you bring new people into that equation, it takes a long time to develop that chemistry with them and learn how to make games in kind of in a in a cohesive way. So, that was the last two years of Mina. They announced the game for October of 2025, but I think even when they did that, they were kind of like, "Yeah, that's not going to happen." And then it was delayed again to May 29th, 2026, which is now when it has come out. During that delay, by the way, it was a lot of polish, a lot of quality of life stuff, a lot of just tweaking things and moving things around and making sure players understood exactly where to go because again, adding that complexity of

letting you as Mina walk in any direction just really adds so much to the game. I think it can add a lot of depth to the game, but it also just from a designer's point of view, you have to do so much to make sure the player never feels overwhelmed or confused and that it's clear where you could walk. Now, I'll give you a good example of that. So, in Mina, I don't want to spoil too much, but I'll give it just one example of a mechanic that the developers told me about, which is there's this mechanic in an area called Sept Ember, where there's these lightning rods and lightning is striking and you have to kind of stand near a lightning rod in order for it to harness the electricity and so it won't strike you, Mina. And what they did was they kind of they have that mechanic in that area, but they also like have that same mechanic like in other places in the world and you could run into it without really understanding it. And so what they had to do was like take harness that, rein that in a little bit and make that more contained to that one area and make it so you actually learned how that mechanic would work through the gameplay, which is something that Yacht Club is really good at is like teaching you how mechanics work by introducing

them to you in a in a kind of slow way where you you learn learn about them maybe in a way where you can't be hurt and then from there it gets more and more challenging and gets ramped up every time. And so to have that be self-contained rather than all throughout the world, you wouldn't run into it without having any idea what it actually was, which again, I mean that sounds pretty easy and and straightforward in retrospect, but when you're designing a big open world, it's can be really tricky and and difficult to think about that sort of thing and think about how everything works cohesively and think about how the player is learning about mechanics as they go. So, that was last few years of Mina. And let's talk about the financials because Yacht Club Games as an independently run studio is funded entirely by the money that it makes from Shovel Knight and its expansions, at least the ones that the people who buy the expansions instead of getting them for free. And also some of the other projects it's had over the years. It's had some spin-offs, Shovel Knight Dig and Showdown and it published a game called Cyber Shadow. None of those were as big as hits as as Shovel Knight, but

they were all profitable, so all contributing to the coffers. And what happens is at a certain point any game is going to going to slow down in sales and so ideally if you're an independent studio, you want to have what's called a runway, which is the amount of money you have in the bank and the amount of time that you can fund the studio. Last video we talked about burn rate, right? So, if you think about the burn rate of a studio like that, it's about 15 people. I I don't know exactly what it is. Let's say, I don't know, a few hundred thousand um every month or every year, whatever it is. Uh you ideally want a runway of like a couple of years. So, you could keep paying staff even if you didn't bring in any money for the next 2 years, you could bring in uh you could keep paying staff without having to worry about ever missing payroll. And what happened was because Mina took so much longer than they thought they didn't really have a new original project to get to build revenue up is they ran into that runway and are almost out of it. Pretty much almost like almost very close to the end of that runway. Um they wound up having to lay off staff as a result of this a couple

of years ago in order to make sure that that runway could could be as long as it needed to be for Mina. Um so, uh we're now at this point where it is, like I said before, like Sean Velasco told me, a make or break moment for the studio. Um Mina's just come out. I mean, the good news is that it is critically acclaimed. Um it seems to be doing okay. I just checked Steam and it uh last I checked it is the number six best seller on Steam, which I think is pretty solid. Um I bet it's going to do really well on Nintendo platforms cuz Yacht Club's games, they're very much built for a Nintendo audience. So, I expect that will will be a hit on Switch. Um but yeah, but it needs to be a hit for them and and they're hoping that it'll help refresh their coffers for the next couple of years. But yeah, the chemistry part of this really I think that a really good takeaway here is just how important chemistry is. And when you're making something like games, which are really I'll talk about this down the road. Um and I've written quite a lot about this. So, check out Bloodstained Pixels if you want to know more about this. But like games live at this intersection between

art and technology where they are extremely complicated and difficult to make in a way that I think um a lot of other pieces of art are not. Um and I think that trying to reduce the number of complicated variables along the way is really important and therefore having a team that knows each other and can work really well together is really important because um, when you have all of the complexities of making games and like the scheduling conflicts and the technology conflicts and um, the simple like reality of not being able to tell if something is fun until uh, a a well a ways in when you really have uh, your systems online and everything is starting to come together, um, all of that just kind of if that's disrupted by having a team that doesn't work well together or like doesn't know how to communicate, that is essentially impossible to to work with and some of the best examples of just kind of indie success stories over the years from Hollow Knight to Supergiant to now Yacht

Club are just studios where the people involved have just stuck together and been working together for a really long time and know each other's languages. Another good example Dispatch last year, um, was made by a crew of people that had worked together for decades, um, at Telltale and then Ubisoft and then starting Dispatch together. So, um, I think team cohesion is extremely important and is something that in uh, the modern video game industry, well, really the entire history of the video game industry, uh, many companies have not appreciated and not valued. And when you see big layoffs and shuffling and studios just not caring about their core creative people, that leads to a lack of chemistry and that can lead to way worse games and way worse projects and just less money for everybody. So, uh, I think that that a good takeaway here is just how important it is to have good team chemistry and cohesion. And one takeaway that Yacht Club told me is that after this

experience they will certainly not be splitting up their team again. Um, after Mina they will all be working on their next project likely to be the 3D Shovel Knight game that they shelved a couple of years ago. They're going to pick that back up. And we'll we'll see how that goes. But yeah, they need Mina to be a hit first. So I will be very I will be keeping an eye on the commercial success of this game. If it matches the critical success, good news for them is that from what I've seen, if you hit 90 plus on Metacritic, you're probably going to hit. So we'll we'll see how that goes and I will certainly be keeping an eye out. So what do I say now? Like and subscribe, smash that like button, smash that subscribe button. You don't have to smash it. I actually I feel like if you smash it, your keyboard might get hurt and you might have some problems. So maybe don't smash it that hard. Maybe kind of lightly lightly click that like and subscribe button and I'll see you all next time.