Why Did Silksong Take So Long? It’s Not What You Might Think

Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, is finally releasing on September 4 after years of development and fears from the community that the game may never see the light of day. But Silksong is real, we’ve played it, and the upcoming launch is looming so large that multiple game studios have delayed their upcoming projects to get out of the way. But why did Silksong take so long to make?

Team Cherry founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen said Silksong was not stuck in development hell or anything like that. The enormous success of the 2017 game–it’s sold more than 15 million copies–allowed the Australia-based developers to develop the follow-up at their own pace.

“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.”

Silksong was originally envisioned as an expansion to Hollow Knight, but it became a big enough project to shift to a full, standalone release. That’s one of the reasons why it didn’t come out sooner.

As for why Team Cherry went quiet and didn’t discuss development updates with fans over the years, Gibson said the team opted not to because, “All we could really say is, ‘We’re still working on it.'”

Pellen added: “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.”

At one point, Silksong was officially scheduled to launch before June 2023, and Pellen said the team did “genuinely believe” the game would make it out then. But that didn’t happen, of course.

The wait could have been even longer. Gibson said Team Cherry has a development structure that allows its members to “see results fasts,” with ideas turning into real elements of the game “almost immediately.” That was a fun way to work, Gibson said, but it also presented challenges.

“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, tha’ts in.’ You realize, ‘If I don’t stop drawing, this is going to take 15 years to finish.'”

Silksong will release on September 4 for console and PC, and you’ll be able to play it at launch via Game Pass.

“Hollow Knight: Silksong appears to be exactly what we all should have expected: a strong, well-designed, visually lovely game that carries forward the aesthetic and design philosophies of the original with thoughtful, if not earth-shattering, updates,” Steve Watts wrote after going hands-on with Silksong at Gamescom this week.