Hollow Knight: Silksong har releasedatum!!!

Hi everyone, and welcome to a special edition of Game On about a very special game that we’ll be playing quite soon.

The wait is over
It’s surreal to write, but it’s true: Silksong will be out on Sept. 4.

After six years of near-total silence from the developers and enough feverish anticipation to make it the most wish-listed game on Steam, the sequel to the indie hit Hollow Knight is releasing in two weeks. Team Cherry, the small team behind both games, announced the news Thursday in a trailer.

Why did it take so long?

Often, such protracted development cycles are caused by mismanagement and result in painful burnout among the staff. But speaking to me last week on a video call from their office in Adelaide, Australia, Team Cherry Co-Founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen said that making Silksong has been nothing but a joyful process.

“We’ve been having fun,” Gibson said. “This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It’s nice to make fun things.”

The lengthy production wasn’t the result of development challenges or obstacles, they said. They just needed all these years to ensure that Silksong was exactly the game they wanted to make.

“It was never stuck or anything,” Gibson said. “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 Silksong saga started in 2017 when Team Cherry released Hollow Knight, an action-platformer set in a vast world full of cartoon bugs. A Switch version, released the following year, added to the momentum. By the end of 2018, millions of fans were raving about its polished gameplay, distinct style and impeccable vibes. As of today, the game has sold 15 million copies, Team Cherry told me, making it one of the most successful independent video games ever.

Initially, Gibson and Pellen had planned to release an expansion pack revolving around Hornet, one of its key characters. But in February 2019, they announced that the expansion had grown too big and would instead become a full-fledged sequel, titled Silksong.

Hollow Knight had been massive, and their plan at the outset was to build a smaller world for Silksong. To ensure that the game felt just as deep, they’d implement an elaborate quest system that would offer the player reasons to backtrack and revisit old locations. In contrast to Hollow Knight, which had a single town full of shops and characters to meet, there would also be multiple towns, each serving as a hub for quests.

“Even at that point we were recognizing that it was going to become another giant thing to rival the scale of Hollow Knight or probably exceed it,” Gibson said. “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 all came down to their development style, which may have been too much fun. Gibson and Pellen — who were joined by programmer Jack Vine, composer Chris Larkin and a few contractors who helped with programming and testing — started off by designing the core gameplay for Hornet, the game’s slick protagonist. From there, it was easy to implement and test out new ideas, even as the game grew bigger.

“We’re very fortunate that we have a development method that is so enjoyable,” Gibson said. “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.”

“You’re always working on a new idea, new item, new area, new boss,” Pellen said. “That stuff’s so nice. It’s for the sake of just completing the game that we’re stopping. We could have kept going.”

The downside of this methodology was that it could have lasted forever.

“I remember at some point I just had to stop sketching,” Gibson said. “Because I went, ‘Everything I’m drawing here has to end up in the game. That’s a cool idea, that’s in. That’s a cool idea, that’s in.’ You realize, ‘If I don’t stop drawing, this is going to take 15 years to finish.’”

During the development of Hollow Knight, Gibson and Pellen frequently posted game updates and talked to players. At the end of 2019, Team Cherry posted one more update about Silksong, then went silent — much to fans’ dismay.

“We felt like continued updates were just going to sour people on the whole thing,” Gibson said. “Because all we could really say is, ‘We’re still working on it.’”

They wanted to be particularly cautious about avoiding spoilers. Much of the thrill of Hollow Knight came from accidentally stumbling upon secret passageways or breaking down walls to find hidden bugs. Silksong has plenty of its own secrets that they didn’t want to detail before the release.

Plus, they thought Silksong would be out much sooner.

“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. “Probably at the time we thought we’d go quiet for a year or two, then the game would come out.”

In 2020, as Covid disrupted most video-game productions around the world, Adelaide was able to stave off the worst of the pandemic, going months without new cases, which allowed Gibson and Pellen to continue plugging along on Silksong. “Seems a little odd knowing that the rest of the world has such a dramatic and isolating period,” Gibson said. “Here we were, going to cafés and having brunch.”

Silksong briefly resurfaced in 2022 during an Xbox event, which promised that all of the games shown would be out within a year. Xbox doubled down on Twitter, saying the Hollow Knight sequel would be out before June 2023.

At the time, they all thought it was true. “We did genuinely believe that was the case,” Pellen said. “There was a period of two to three years when I thought it was going to come out within a year.”

But the game kept growing. Silksong has more elaborate bosses than Hollow Knight, more gameplay systems and more interactivity. Gibson and Pellen wanted objects in the world to react to Hornet’s various tools, which required a ton of drawing and animation work.

“I think we’re always underestimating the amount of time and effort it’ll take us to achieve things,” Gibson said. “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.’”

The longer development lasted, the more pressure Gibson and Pellen felt to ensure that everything was as fine-tuned as possible. They’d already spent four years on it — why would they rush now? The more time they spent polishing some parts, the more time they needed to apply it consistently across the rest.

“There’s a level of finish that has to be met throughout the entire game,” Pellen said. “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.”

Throughout development, Team Cherry remained tiny, which may have extended the production time but also saved them from the slog of having to manage and delegate. “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.”

Staying small also meant eschewing the production practices commonplace at many game-development studios.

“What is Jira?” Gibson said when I asked if they used the task-management application.

“Is it a software?” Pellen said, adding that they’d briefly used Trello before their account was deactivated because they didn’t use it enough.

As development dragged on, the hype for Silksong grew more feverishScreenshot: Team Cherry
Perhaps the biggest reason Silksong took so long was that Team Cherry never had to worry about the one thing that keeps other independent developers awake at night: money.

During the production of Hollow Knight, they’d stayed lean, sometimes living off leftover triangle sandwiches that their office neighbor would bring them after meetings. “My dad would sometimes pop up and give me $20,” Gibson said. “I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m having coffee today!’”

Thanks to their first game’s massive financial success, Gibson and Pellen no longer have to scrounge leftovers. For Pellen, who has two kids and a third on the way, that’s provided an inestimable peace of mind. For Gibson, who said he spends most of his time at the office, it hasn’t changed much. “I live in a very basic two-bedroom apartment,” he said. “Sometimes I think, ‘You know what would be better, is a one-bedroom apartment.’ Because then there’s even less to maintain.”

The game has continued to generate revenue by reaching new players, perhaps in large part due to the Silksong buzz. When the studio announced Silksong in February 2019, Hollow Knight had sold 2.8 million copies. The game has sold another 12 million copies since then, allowing Team Cherry to keep working on the sequel indefinitely without having to worry about running out of funds.

“We’re very lucky in that regard,” Gibson said. “I don’t ever really think about it that much. Maybe that’s the privilege of it.”

As the years went on, the hype kept building. A Reddit forum dedicated to the game filled up with nonsensical blabber and made-up tweets, which users called “silkposts,” a variation on the expletive. Meanwhile, chat sections for video-game livestreams and Nintendo Direct events were plagued with the same feral messages repeated over and over: “Silksong when?”

Gibson and Pellen tuned it all out, rarely going online. They say they never read comments on YouTube or Reddit, although occasionally friends or family would send them some of the funniest ones.

“It’s nice that people are passionate about the game, and that they’ve obviously formed their own strange or very exciting communities around it,” Gibson said.

“Feels like we’re going to ruin their fun by releasing the game,” Pellen said.

Once in a while, people would show up at the Team Cherry office, sometimes with their children, perhaps hoping for a Willy Wonka type experience. Inevitably, they were disappointed by what they found instead. “It’s a grubby room with cardboard boxes,” Gibson said.

Their walls remain the same dull avocado color that they were when Team Cherry moved in more than a decade ago. They never even put up art. They’ve been too busy making the game.

In early 2025, Gibson and Pellen began to see the finish line and started making plans to release the game in the fall. Players desperate for information devoured every scrap of news — like the announcement that it would be playable at a museum in September — hoping this might finally be the year.

Both Nintendo Co. and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox said during live events this year that Silksong was planned for 2025, but fans were cautious. They’d been down this road before.

Meanwhile, Team Cherry kept working. The shape of the game has been finalized for a while, Pellen said. The last year or two has been all about the details — adding small encounters, polishing everything and tying it all together.

And they’re still working to finalize things until the last possible minute. As we spoke, with Silksong a little more than three weeks out, I spotted programmer Jack Vine in the background, tweaking code for one of the game’s console ports.

Gibson and Pellen say they’re happy that the game is finally coming out — and even happier that they will get to keep working on it, which they still find enjoyable even after seven years. They haven’t burned out or shown any desire to take a break. Instead, they’re already making big plans to add extra content to Silksong in the months and years to come.

“Launching it is obviously quite exciting,” Pellen said. “What comes after for us is equally as exciting.”

“The most interesting thing now is what can we add to it next,” Gibson said. “We got a plan. Admittedly, some of the plans for that stuff are kind of ambitious as well, but hopefully we can achieve some of it.”

Stay tuned for 2032 to see how that turns out."