Hollow Knight is one of the most beloved games of the 2010s nowadays, but once upon a time, it was just a hopeful Metroidvania in a sea of others. Developer Team Cherry wanted to create a game much smaller than Hollow Knight eventually became, and the team even debated whether they should set a more realistic Kickstarter goal just days before the campaign went live.
That's according to a Straight from the Source interview with Team Cherry co-directors Ari Gibson and William Pellen, conducted all the way back in 2018 and newly published now.
The duo explained that Hollow Knight's Kickstarter funding goal of AU$35,000 was set as such to match "the scale of game that we intended to make at the time." Pellen even said the team "were debating" whether to shave off $5,000 just "a few days before it went live" to coincide with just how small the game would be.
"That number was to create a Metroidvania that was very small. It was really like a small thing," Gibson said, before Pellen added that the game would've been "like two hours or something."
Of course, Hollow Knight raised around $58,000 and that allowed the team to "make it a level bigger," according to Gibson. "And then because of funding that we got entirely from that campaign, it allowed us to work for a period of two years, essentially, and that allowed the game to get bigger again." The team's various financial situations and some extra cash from the Indie Fund helped things chug along, too.
Making a game several times bigger than initially planned now seems like a Team Cherry specialty. Marketing representative Matthew Griffin announced, circa 2023, that the sequel Hollow Knight Silksong had been delayed out of the first half of the year because it had gotten "quite big." We've barely seen glimpses of it here and there, so that might've been an understatement.
