Team Cherry, developer of Hollow Knight, has announced a release date of September 4 for the long-awaited sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong.
Over 300,000 concurrent viewers gathered to watch the announcement via Team Cherry’s YouTube channel earlier today. At the time of publication, roughly three hours later, the video has over 1.4 million views and counting.
The numbers above encapsulate a fraction of the popularity around the sequel, which was announced back in 2019, two years after the release of Hollow Knight, which is a sprawling action-adventure game. Team Cherry hasn’t run an extensive marketing cycle, aside from sporadic appearances in video game showcases from Xbox, Nintendo, and Gamescom. For a while, before any conference, people turned to the meme of expecting news of a release date for Silksong. This included industry figure Geoff Keighley, who joked about it on Monday of this week via X (formerly Twitter), ahead of his hosting Gamescom Opening Night Live, which took place on Tuesday.
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Hollow Knight sold over 2.8 million copies by 2019, two years after its release. It was, by all means, a successful launch for Team Cherry, an indie development team consisting primarily of three people. But the popularity continued to snowball from there. As of today, according to an interview with Bloomberg, Hollow Knight has sold 15 million copies.
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Silksong has been in development for seven years now. When asked about why the dev cycle has taken this long, Team Cherry co-founders Ari Gibson and Willian Pellen said that they’ve been having fun, and that the project has been a vehicle for their creativity.
“It was never stuck or anything,” Gibson told Bloomberg. “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.”
The idea for the sequel came from designing a DLC that progressively grew in scope, until the team realized that it could become a separate title altogether. According to the devs, that growth continued over time—in 2022, Team Cherry featured Silksong during an Xbox event that promised that all of the games shown would be out within a year. But that wasn’t the case.
“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.'”
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According to Team Cherry, maintaining the team small saved them from having to manage and delegate, even if that led to extended production time. The co-founders are joined by programmer Jack Vine, composer Chris Larking, and “a few contractors” who helped with programming and testing.
“We don’t want to mess with the formula and then find out it’s not fun,” Gibson said. “I used to manage teams in past lives. I don’t really want to do that ever again.”
This methodology has allowed for a distinct approach to developing a game, to the point where the team seems unaware of task-management applications. Gibson asked “What is Jira?” when prompted if they had used it at some point. Meanwhile, Pellen wondered “Is it software?” and added that the team briefly used Trello before their account was deactivated for lack of use.