Why Hollow Knight: Silksong Took Seven Years To Make

Hello, OneTakeSchrier here, and today we're going to tell the incredible story behind Hollow Knight: Silksong. Something I'm going to be trying on this channel in the coming days and weeks and months is not just talking about things that are timely, but also telling some of the stories that I've told over the years in written form, except now in video form. This is the future, man. Got to Got to get used to it. Um so, as usual, you can find the written companions in the show notes. I'll post two There are two big stories that I did, two big interviews with the creators of Hollow Knight that are kind of the the basis for this video, and those links will be in the show notes with free gift links so you can check them out for free. At least although I found out that apparently our gift links only last seven days. So, if you're watching this video more than seven days after it went live, you will have to pay for Book Riot. Thank you. Thank you for supporting my work. Anyway, let's get on with it. It's so in 2013, these two developers in uh in South

Australia in Adelaide named Ari Gibson and William Pellen made a game for a game jam that they called Hungry Knight. Um they took the hero of this of this Hungry Knight game, and they started building a new project for him that was inspired by classic games like Mega Man and Zelda and this NES game called Xanadu is what I always called it when I was a kid playing this game, but it's actually pronounced more like Fajana do. Um but it's spelled f a x a n a d u. It's an early early game um early kind of uh action adventure platformer game that was very influential for a lot of people and inspired a great deal of what would become Hollow Knight. So, these guys, Ari and William, they call themselves Team Cherry, and they called their game Hollow Knight. And in November of 2014, they launched a Kickstarter for Hollow Knight where they asked for um $35,000 in Australian dollars. I guess they call them dollarooze or dollary bucks or whatever ridiculous Australian terminology they use.

Um and they wound up raising $57,000 buckaroo buckaroo style buckaroo dollars, um which was uh which was convenient because they actually had a stretch goal at 56,000 buckaroos for a second playable character, which would work out nicely. A little bit a little bit of foreshadowing there. So, these guys Ari Gibson and William Pellen and they bring in this programmer David Kazi and they bring in this brilliant composer named Christopher Larkin and they start working on this game, spend takes about 2 years, 2 years and some change, and on February 24th, 2017, they release Hollow Knight. And this game is immediately successful. Um when it launches on PC, people really love the vibes and the world and the way it feels to jump around and and down slash and take out enemies. It's got all sorts of cool things going for it. It's got this this Souls-like um death system. It's got this really um challenging and and uh intriguing map system where basically you don't know anything. You don't know where you are. You don't have any sense of the geography until you find a map maker and

then you have to buy a map for them um in order to see kind of the location. But on top of that, you also need to if you want to be able to see where you are in relation everything else, you need to use one of your valuable charm slots to equip a compass just to see where you are and keep track of yourself on the map. It's got a lot of mystery. It's got a lot of secrets. People really like it. Um they keep following up with all this DLC, a boss rush, this mysterious carnival troop that shows up in the town. Um and the game winds up doing really well. It sells about a million copies in its first year or so. And then in June of 2018, it gets shadow dropped at E3 um at the Nintendo Direct for the Nintendo Switch. And that's when I first played it, actually. I was waiting for it to come to handheld. I'd been hearing it was really good on PC, but like I wanted to play it on the go. It's the perfect kind of portable game. And uh I got hooked. I played through uh I played the entire flight home from that E3, I was playing through it on my switch. And then I was stoked like about a year later in February of 2019 when Team Cherry announced that that second

playable stretch goal, that second playable character stretch goal, had gotten so big that instead of just releasing a new campaign where you play as Hornet, like you play through the entire original Hollow Knight as Hornet, it's actually going to become a new game called Silksong. It's funny cuz Shovel Knight by Yacht Club did the same thing where they had this promised these stretch goals that wound up turning into an entirely new game. So, think if you call your game knight in some way, you are going to overscope and get too ambitious and wind up taking way way way too many years on your game. So, June 2019, Silksong gets shown off at E3, the final E3 it turns out. And it gets demoed on the show floor, it's got this this big like 20-30 minute demo, they play it on the treehouse, the Nintendo treehouse, it's it's part of the switch presentation there. And I'll never forget actually playing it for the first time at the Nintendo booth cuz first of all it felt very polished and I was like, "Oh great, fantastic, maybe we'll get this in a year or two." But second of all because the booth was actually empty.

That was for a couple reasons, one is because the E3 of that year was kind of empty and obviously E3 died because of COVID, but I think it was pretty clear at that last E3 before we even knew what COVID was, it was clear that it was on its way out. So, I got to just walk up to this booth and be like, "Oh crap, Silksong, awesome." Hornet's jumping took some getting used to, you have this kind of diagonal jump, but still it was it was great. I was really jazzed about it. And Team Cherry wrote at the time, I'm going to read from their blog post, they wrote, "For Silksong, we're running on Cherry time over here. That means both when it's ready and when it matches the quality and scale of Hollow Knight. Just know we will talk about a release date when we're 100% certain we can hit it." And I think it's safe to say they lived up to that promise because over the next 6 years Team Cherry stayed basically silent about Silksong. And as this happened, something funny started to happen. It became sort of a marketing technique that was actually pretty effective because the hype around Silksong became feverish. More and more

people started to discover how great Hollow Knight was as it started coming to other consoles and becoming just building up all this great word of mouth, and people realized there was a sequel in development, but like they hadn't heard anything about it in a while. And every single time we got kind of drips and drabs about the game, more hype and anticipation would build up. At the Xbox showcase in June of 2022, Team Cherry showed off Silksong, and and basically it was implied that the people behind that Xbox showcase said everything here will be out in the next 12 months. So, people thought, "Oh, okay, great. Silksong is coming by June 2023." Obviously, that did not happen. The years kept coming, the months kept coming, and Silksong was nowhere to be found. And it wound up becoming this kind of self-perpetuating cycle where like every single Nintendo Direct, every Game Awards, every PlayStation State of Play, every Xbox showcase, the the chat would just be "Where's Silksong? Where's Silksong?" That's all people wanted to know. Where the heck is Silksong? And the more people talked about Silksong, the more people went and discovered Hollow Knight and played through that, loved it for the most part, and then

said, "Hey, where I want a sequel. Where's Silksong?" So, it just led to more people wanting Silksong. By 2025, buzz began building that that was the year. This would be the year that Silksong finally came out. There's a Nintendo Direct where it got a release date saying 2025 inside a sizzle reel, which was hilarious because a sizzle reel is like one of those little like montages that you do for all the unimportant games, the games that don't deserve their own segments. And here we are finding out that Silksong is coming out in 2025. Then it gets shown off again at the Xbox showcase in June, and they're like coming out before this holiday, but still Team Cherry stays silent. Here is when I come into the story a little bit because in early August, I actually reached out to Ari Gibson, one of the the members of Team Cherry, and I said, "Hey, it seems like the game's coming out soon. How would you guys like to do an interview with me about the development of the game and like why it's taken so long?" And they said, "Sure." And so I sent him a a video call with them. It was me and Gibson and William Pellen and Jack Vine,

their programmer at this point, who had replaced David Kazi, writing code in the background of their tiny little office in Adelaide. No decorations on the walls, just these kind of this ugly ugly wallpaper and just computers and it does not does not look like the type of office you would expect from, given how successful their game is. Um so, uh so I get on the call with them and um as I'm preparing for this interview, obviously I do all this research and and just kind of track everything they've said up until now, but I have no idea what to expect. And I'm kind of like I'm expecting them to talk about how grueling the process was, how they kept changing their minds, how the pressure of following up on Hollow Knight was just too much to deal with, how they ran into technical challenges, how the success got to their heads and tore them apart and tore up their relationship. Instead, they're like, "Oh yeah, we were having a blast." Um I'm going to quote from Ari Gibson. He says, quote, "We've been having fun. This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It's nice to make fun things. It

was never stuck or anything. 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." So I'm sitting there, I'm like, "What?" And they start telling me how like um they have this amazing pipeline that moves really fast. A lot of games, and this will be a consistent theme, if you hear me talking about games and read my work and stuff, a lot of games have this issue where um because of the way their tech is set up and their tools are set up, when they make when someone makes something, like if someone uh changes something in a level or a stage or moves some items around, some geography, some top topography around, it can actually take a while for that to be reflected in the game. And so, iteration can be a real pain because you're waiting hours for for this thing to just load, and it just makes it feel much, much less fun. Whereas with Team Cherry, they have this pipeline that moves very fast. They can come up with weird ideas and just have them in the game immediately, within minutes. Um which makes it a lot more fun to work on. Um there was a ton of over-scoping. The game evolved from this smaller-scale

world where the idea was to have it smaller than Hollow Knight um with a single town and a handful of quests to this massive um massive world with multiple towns and tons of quests. And of course, there's lots of polish. And if you played Silksong, you can see it all over, all these tiny little details, um all this all this polish everywhere. There's songs. You play the needle in uh Hornet's musical instrument, and there are different songs for every enemy in the game. Plus, Hornet talks, so there's much more dialogue and story and characters. Um they told me that during development, they worked on each act successively, and that helped them kind of have the structure in their minds and again, make it feel more fun. Um and they opened each one up to playtesters as they went, which was also very helpful for them. They always knew it was going to be this upward journey from Farloom to the Citadel and then to and then the abyss where the world is destroyed. They knew it was going to have these three acts. Um they always had this kind of main structure in mind. Nothing really changed over the years. They just kept adding polish, kept adding secrets, kept expanding stuff, kept finding moments

where they would run their heads against the wall and then try to find little little avenues they could add to make things a little bit easier or add little backtracking, little secrets they could add. And if you backtracked or kind of side paths that you could go through. Um but part of the nature of this process is that they really didn't know how long it was all going to take because there was always more to do, always more to more to polish. Um William Pellen told me, quote, "There was a period of two to three years when I thought it was going to come out within a year." Here's the other important part of this whole They told me that by the time they and I had talked August of 2025, Hollow Knight had sold 15 million copies, which is a remarkable number, makes it one of the best-selling indie games. Really one of the best-selling games of all time. Gave them generational wealth and also removed any sort of financial pressure from this release, which a lot of times in game development, especially in indie game development, a lot of times a game

comes out and has a a kind of a hard deadline or at least a deadline that can't be moved too much because of financial pressure. Because if the game doesn't come out by X time, they will run out of money and not be able to pay their employees anymore. Or they will not be able to feed themselves anymore. So that becomes this kind of force and function that they just did not have and it allowed them to really take their time with the game. So I asked them, "Hey, how has this money changed your lives?" And it was interesting. For Pellen, Pellen has kids. So for him it's kind of a piece of mind thing, doesn't have to worry about about their kind of futures, that sort of thing. Doesn't have to worry about, I don't know, paying for college or whatever. Do you have to pay a lot of Australia paying for I'm not sure how much it costs to send your kids to college in Australia, but here in the US it's it's something uh on the forefront of of a lot of parents' minds. Um Gibson told me, quote, "I live in a very basic two-bedroom apartment. Sometimes I think, you know what would be better is a one-bedroom apartment because then there's even less to maintain." So for him it's it's all about game development. So as this as this time has

been going during this development time, during this six, seven years, the hype grew feverish. Um people started showing up at their office every once in a while, um which not ideal, but like for for Team Cherry they were just like, "There's nothing to see here. Sorry, guys." Um they found this uh this whole thing, this hype, this kind of hype building, they found it very amusing. They didn't read a ton of the online comments, they told me, although occasionally I'll see Ari Gibson's uh Era profile, I'll see that he's online. So, clearly he's checking Reset Era every once in a while. Um, but here's the thing, it was very fun for them. The process was so much fun drawing bugs and designing levels and creating these bosses, these big hulking bosses, was just so much of a blast that they didn't want to stop, which is something I personally cannot relate to because when I am writing or working on something, all I want to be doing is not writing. So, I don't personally get that one, but that's that's what brings these guys joy. So, August 21st, Team Cherry says, "Hey,

Silksong is going to be out in 2 weeks." They didn't do any other press aside from that interview with me, and then they did a museum kind of exhibit where they spoke to the museum curators. They didn't send out review copies. They didn't give anyone warning to the point where other games had to move out of the way because they were terrified of being out around the same time as Silksong. They didn't even do pre-loading, which caused some problems on launch day when they broke Steam and all the other stores. I asked them about this a little bit later, and Pellen was like, quote, "That was surprising. I didn't even know that could happen." Um, game comes out, critically acclaimed, nominated for game of the year, sold millions of copies, has become one of my favorite games of all time. I still occasionally will load it up and just like spend some time exploring and slashing bugs and and fighting monsters. I think fighting bosses. I think one of the real kind of secrets to this game's success is that the act of just slashing and jumping and

moving is just feels so good that combined on a on a micro level, it's just so much fun to be playing that you combine that with kind of the macro level secrets and and scope and decisions that you're making, and it just really adds to this kind of holistic incredible experience. Plus all that Larkin music I mentioned before. So, yeah, it's become one of my favorite games of all time. So, I was jazzed once again when a few months after it came out in December of last year, Team Cherry said, "Hey, we're making an expansion. It's called Sea of Sorrow, and it'll be out in 2026." Well, it's now July of 2026, and we haven't heard anything about it, so we'll see about that one. There have been some hints, and and if you read my Bloomberg interview with them, my kind of follow-up Bloomberg, which interview with them, which was a couple months after the game came out, we talked a little bit about what could be in this thing. They were a little cagey about about what's actually going to be in it, but we talked a little bit about some of the kind of content that they've talked about in the past, especially attached to the Kickstarter that still hasn't come out, such as a a lion

village, of a serious lion village, and a steel soldier named Sharp, who is yet to appear in anything related to Hollow Knight. Um so, what's next? What else is coming for them other than this DLC? Well, maybe we'll see more DLC, but they also don't just want to be the Hollow Knight makers for the rest of their lives. They want to work on other games, too, which I think presents a little bit of a problem because they are a very small team. Again, it's three people, plus a composer, so really four people, plus a couple of testers here and there, a little bit of additional support, and then a bunch of voice actors, and translation support, and stuff like that. Very, very tiny team, so it takes them a long time to do things. They put in a lot of polish. They're very meticulous about their work, and as a result, games that they think will take them a couple years wind up taking way more, six or seven. Um so, if they want to make other games, they they got to get on it. And I will

leave you, I will end this story with a quote from Ari Gibson, who said, quote, "And then we do have other games we plan to make. The only time concern, really, is, and we've talked about this before, death. It's not that far off if you spend seven years per project and potentially add another two. So, it would be nice to do a few more games. Apparently, our time frame still allows us to fit a few more in short of an unexpected tragedy. So, after Silk Song, we'll get Sea of Sorrow, maybe give it, I don't know, maybe we'll have another year or so of additional content, and then maybe they'll get set off to work on something new. Maybe it'll be more Hollow Knight, maybe it won't, but here's hoping that the folks at Team Cherry have many more games in them before they die. All right, that is that for this week's episode, for for today's episode. See, I'm used to I'm used to ending If you don't know, I have a podcast called Triple Click, and usually I end it by saying, "That is that for this week's episode." Here, we do more than one

episode per week, so that is that for today's story, the story of Hollow Knight. Let me know what you think of kind of revisiting some of these old stories. I think down the road, I may go through some of my old articles and tell stories about games like um Anthem and Cyberpunk and Dragon Age and other just kind of interesting game stories, Destiny, other interesting game stories from over the years and turn them into videos. Let me know what you think of that or if you would rather have more timely coverage or if you want a mix of both. Would love to hear your thoughts, and don't forget to smash that like and subscribe button so hard that you break your computer and have to buy a new one and wind up spending $4,000 because of the AI memory crisis. See you next time.