The Hollow Knight: Silksong arc needs to be studied and remembered: a small team of happy devs were just "having fun" making their game, not burning out, while the internet imploded

Whisper it three times, pinch yourself, do whatever you have to do to absorb the reality that the Hollow Knight: Silksong release date has finally arrived. Team Cherry's next game is out September 4 on all platforms. In the time since its 2019 reveal, empires rose and fell, stars blinked out, and (no, seriously) a global pandemic came and sort of went. It was all(?) worth it.

Yet for my money, the best part of today's Silksong special isn't the impending launch. We already knew it was coming this year, and now we know it's just two weeks away. That's enough time for a last-minute 100% replay of the first game, which is nice. But I'm most struck by the fact that the folks at Team Cherry, long dramatized in the heads of worried fans as a scrappy studio struggling with setbacks, apparently couldn't be further from burnout or development hell.

That's according to a great article from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who spoke with studio co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen about the long road to Silksong's release. For most game devs, setting and hitting a release date is a huge deal, the ultimate milestone. And it is a big deal for Team Cherry and Silksong, but Gibson and Pellen, who also once thought the game might've been out much sooner, almost seem to treat it the way players might treat the need to sleep when they're utterly absorbed in a game. Oh yeah, I guess I have to do that real quick, but then I'll get back to the fun part.

"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."

Gibson affirmed Silksong development "was never stuck or anything," effortlessly swatting away speculation over the development hell that some assumed it must have suffered in its extended production. "It was always progressing," he adds. "It's just the case that we're a small team, and games take a lot of time."

Skong

After all the excitable theories, the story of Hollow Knight: Silksong is what didn't happen. It took a long, long time to make, and it grew well beyond its initial scope, but it didn't weigh on the developers like a boulder that forced them to make grim sacrifices or crunch their lives away. They just kept working. It takes as long as it takes. It didn't see painful reboots or technical disasters or ground-up refactoring. It just took a while because games take a while.

Team Cherry found enormous success, with Bloomberg now reporting Hollow Knight has surpassed 15 million copies sold, but didn't run out and dramatically expand or change how it does things. The team didn't feel the need to be bigger, to assume that bigger is better, to chase even greater success. The devs were happy to be a small team chiseling away at an enormous block of marble one swing, one year, at a time. Sometimes small teams can do things that big teams can't. Gibson said they'd found "a development method that is so enjoyable," and Team Cherry worked to protect that.

So many things did not happen. Silksong fans have imagined and thrown out thousands of more colorful realities. The longer Team Cherry remained silent, at most letting slip an occasional olive branch in Discord, the easier it became to assume the worst, and especially on the internet, assumptions left unchallenged long enough may be seen as fact. Are the devs okay? Have they hit a wall? Is this thing ever coming out? With next to nothing official to go on, fans saw crumbs as feasts – Steam backend updates, publisher teasers, or tragic storefront placeholders besieged by investigators with magnifying glasses and bloodshot eyes.

With every new gaming event no-show, whether a Nintendo Indie Direct or Geoff Keighley's latest emcee gig, disappointment mounted until it eventually became ritualistic, a badge for the faithful to wear to Skong gatherings. Attendees no longer asked if this show will be the one. Instead, piling into YouTube and Twitch chats or Reddit posts, they seemed to commiserate and concede. I'll see you at the next one.

The fandom became self-sustaining, reveling in "Silkposting" that parodied and fueled the online chatter around the game. I've been doing game journalism for 12 years. In that time, I haven't seen anything else come close to Silksong fervor, and I've seen Destiny 2 players assemble the Reddit equivalent of a particle accelerator to solve lore math. It's been chaos. It's been amazing. It's been an honor. But for Team Cherry, it's been business as usual.

A beautiful day in Australia

Fiction was far stranger than truth here, and it's the best anticlimax we could've asked for. The reality is as wonderfully boring as it could be. We have cats chasing dogs, dogs barking at shadows, and shadows throwing punches, and Team Cherry just happily plugging away, savoring a pocket of creativity in a small Australian office with avocado-green walls while the world outside runs itself ragged with theories. 'How did you do it?' the Skong community wondered. 'We just did it,' Team Cherry has said.

The cherry on top is that Pellen casually said, in so many words, we've still got gas in the tank. You ain't seen nothin' yet. "It's for the sake of just completing the game that we're stopping," he said. "We could have kept going." Which is why the studio is already planning post-launch updates which, if we're lucky, will match or exceed the superlative DLCs released for Hollow Knight. Given that Silksong started as a DLC, this tease feels like watching someone defuse a bomb, immediately pull out a second bomb, and start juggling both of them.

Team Cherry is aware of the expectations piled on Silksong, but isn't drowning in them. The devs thought about offering more regular updates on the game, but didn't want to sound like broken records saying, you simply will not believe this, we're still working on it. So, they kept quiet. There was no master plan, just a "responsibility" to work on the game rather than talk about it. They have the agility and war chest to do whatever they want (something most devs do not). And to this day, seven years into development, what they want to do is make Silksong. They evidently love working on it so much that they're going to keep working on it after release, getting back to the fun part after putting the game out into the world. Hollow Knight is my favorite game of all time, and I'm glad this is what actually happened.

Hollow Knight: Silksong is set to release for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox (and Game Pass), and Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 on September 4, 2025.

Hollow Knight Silksong hands-on: 2,379 days after its reveal I finally played the elusive Metroidvania, and it is absolutely worth the wait.