Hollow Knight: Silksong got a trailer and release date today, meaning huge swathes of the internet are now going to need to find a new meme. What took so long? Developer Team Cherry was just making a video game.
According to a story by Jason Schreier at Bloomberg, the big mystery of what’s been up with Silksong since its announcement in 2019 was just studio co-founders William Pellen and Ari Gibson taking their time making their video game. “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,” Gibson said.
According to the developers, Silksong, initially meant to be an expansion, grew big enough to be a full game, and then the team kept adding new ideas. According to Gibson, the studio eventually went radio silent because “[w]e felt like continued updates were just going to sour people on the whole thing.”
“Instead of popping up and bugging people for the sake of it, it felt like our actual responsibility was just to work on the game,” Pellen said.
Sounds right! The studio told Bloomberg they did believe the game would be out sooner, and that, according to Gibson “we’re always underestimating the amount of time and effort it’ll take us to achieve things.” But Gibson also said that, rather than being stressful, the actual development part of developing a game was fun, so the studio wanted to keep doing it. He said, “[I]t’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.’”
My two favorite parts of this story are that the team doesn’t use Jira, a project management software ubiquitous in games and tech (they briefly had Trello, but their account got deactivated because they didn’t use it enough) and that they were mostly ignorant of the online drama around the game. According to Bloomberg, “They say they never read comments on YouTube or Reddit, although occasionally friends or family would send them some of the funniest ones.” Pellen told Bloomberg that it “[f]eels like we’re going to ruin [fans’] fun by releasing the game.”
My second favorite part is that after the hints about the game during a June Xbox showcase and a tease during Tuesday’s Gamescom Opening Night, neither Microsoft nor Geoff Keighley got the big trailer and release date everyone has spent years thirsting for. Team Cherry just put it all up on their YouTube page at what was for me on the East Coast a totally normal time (though after maybe a bit too much countdown). In an industry defined by hype and desperately trying to force the big moments of the past into a space they no longer fit in, one of the most hotly-anticipated games said “no” to all that and just did its own thing.
I won’t go so far as to call this some wider lesson for all game developers; as Bloomberg points out, it certainly helps that the original Hollow Knight made enough money to support a small team taking as long as it wanted to make not just a game, but a sequel to a wildly popular one that people are still playing. And however much the developers claim they didn’t pay attention to the hype and anticipation, the wait and its silence certainly generated buzz that kept both the original (Bloomberg writes that Hollow Knight has sold an additional 12 million copies since Silksong’s 2019 announcement) and Silksong in people’s consciousness, and which it seems reasonable to imagine will have an effect on Silksong’s ultimate sales.
And I don’t think this is some look-in-the-mirror moment for the folks who spammed “Silksong” at every showcase since 2019 either. As the devs themselves acknowledged, what Gibson called the “strange or very exciting communities” that formed around not seeing Silksong were fun in their own right, and certainly gave folks something to rally around as we sat through events over the years. Since this is the internet, I’m sure there were some toxic corners earnestly angered over the wait, and plenty of editors demanding Silksong prewrites tailored to whatever the Google search requirements of the moment were. But from where I sat, Silksong was a funny joke my friends made that offset the dread of covering another showcase for work, a low stakes space to play with anticipation and disappointment in a field that often makes too much out of them.
Of course, that’s all over now: I’m already seeing journalist peers fishing for homes for reviews, worrying over how long they’ll have between code and embargo (Update, 12:55pm--According to Schreier, Team Cherry doesn't plan to send out early code), and stressing about how many other games are releasing near Silksong’s September 4 release date. But, at least for a little while, some fans got to have their jokes, and some developers got to make their video game.
