By: Jewel Marie
From complete silence for almost a decade to crashing all major stores and websites overnight, Hollow Knight: Silksong has made a name for itself as one of the biggest success stories in video game history.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is a sequel to the 2017 hit-game Hollow Knight; a metroidvania where you play as a nameless traveler with an unknown past as you explore Hallownest, a vast fallen kingdom. As the story progresses, you’ll slowly unravel the plot and learn about what happened to the once-glorious kingdom.
Both of these titles were developed by Team Cherry, a small game development studio with a team of only three people. They’re located in Adelaide, South Australia and were founded back in 2014 when development of Hollow Knight began. Shortly after its establishment, Team Cherry began a Kickstarter in order to raise funding for their game.
The Hollow Knight titles are indie games, a term used to refer to games developed by smaller, independent teams that do not have the funding that larger publishers such as Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo do. Examples of popular indie titles include Stardew Valley, Terraria and even Minecraft before it was bought out by Microsoft.
Hollow Knight grew to maintain a widely positive reception from fans and managed to sell over two million copies from February 2017 to February 2019.
That number has since increased by over 12 million.
Hollow Knight has made its mark as one of the most successful indie games ever made.
After following through on a Kickstarter milestone from years ago and developing a small additional story for Hollow Knight, the scope of the new project became much larger than Team Cherry expected. Thus, Hollow Knight: Silksong was announced as a sequel and a brand-new game altogether in February 2019.
The highly-anticipated sequel got new trailers and special demonstrations at gaming events until June 2020, when Team Cherry suddenly dropped off the face of the earth. Other than a small trailer in 2022, fans heard next to nothing from the team for the next five years.
Many fans worried that Team Cherry was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Others thought they created a roadblock in their development. Some even worried that production on the game had stopped entirely.
That all changed on August 21 of this year when, almost out of nowhere, Team Cherry announced that Hollow Knight: Silksong was completed and would be releasing on September 4, just two weeks away.
Gaming fans around the globe went wild. The overall excitement on the internet made Hollow Knight’s long-awaited sequel take the world by storm.
The cherry on top (no pun intended) is that Team Cherry is completely fine. Despite many rumors and concerned fans, the team was simply having too much fun making the game.
Due to the large success of their first game, Team Cherry had a plethora of funding and were in a position to take as much time as they needed. As a result, they kept on adding content to the point their new title became much bigger than even their prequel.
The sudden announcement of an imminent release shook the gaming industry. Other studios and developers with games releasing around the same time delayed their titles, with some studios going as far as admitting it’s because they can’t compete with the sheer scale of Hollow Knight: Silksong.
Other developers acknowledged Team Cherry’s impending success over their games instead. Aggro Crab, the team behind PEAK even went as far as to say “We hope you enjoy PEAK for the next two weeks until you all move on to Silksong.”
Once it was revealed that the Hollow Knight sequel would retail for $20 compared to the $70-80 price point of many other video games, Team Cherry’s success was practically assured. Fans and video game enjoyers everywhere would be able to get a life-changing experience for less than a tank of gas.
Even those who pirate video games to play for free have encouraged fans to just buy the game and show their support.
When Hollow Knight: Silksong finally released at the beginning of this month, all major video game stores crashed within minutes. The Steam, Xbox and Playstation stores were overloaded with traffic, with Nintendo’s eShop going as far as breaking entirely and requiring official maintenance.
While crashes and maintenance are normally troublesome and never a good thing for bigger companies like Microsoft and Nintendo, these are amazing problems to have if you’re one of the three people on Team Cherry.
After an out-of-nowhere success story and one of the longest waiting periods for a video game ever, Hollow Knight: Silksong is now available on all major platforms.
