What Took Silksong Seven Years?

If you’ve been in online video game spaces within the last decade, you’ve more than likely seen the character above, Hornet from the game Hollow Knight (2017). You might have even seen her in some clown makeup from time to time. You probably also know that as of September 4th, 2025, Hornet has starred in her own game. A game that was released nearly seven years after being announced… Well, I am here to offer something of an explanation and exploration of the development of a certain game that has captured the minds of the internet for the last nearly seven years: Hollow Knight: Silksong (2025).

First, let’s start with the prior installment and the game that started it all: Hollow Knight.

Hollow Knight is a 2D Metroidvania developed by the three person Australian development team, Team Cherry. Metroidvania is a subgenre of action game that emphasizes non-linear exploration and backtracking through a large interconnected map, specifically getting its name from the Metroid (1986) and Castlevania (1986) series, both of which pioneered the subgenre. Hollow Knight began as a Kickstarter campaign in 2014 and was released in 2017 to glowing reviews, becoming one of the highest rated indie games of all time

The game itself follows a small, unnamed bug warrior often only called “The Knight” traveling through the ruins of a decaying kingdom known as Hollownest. Within the bowels of this underground kingdom an infection has taken over, warping the minds of the inhabitants and turning them into violent beasts that The Knight must cut down. During your travels, the player will encounter another bug in a red dress wielding a sewing needle named Hornet, a key character to the story of Hollow Knight and an instant fan favorite in her own right. 

During the campaign to fund Hollow Knight back in 2014, one of the stretch goals reached was for there to be a secondary playable character with their own unique quests and abilities. That was originally going to take the form of a DLC where the player controls Hornet through her own section of the game, but that all changed in 2019. On February 14th that year, a trailer was released announcing Hollow Knight: Silksong, a sequel to Hollow Knight that would follow Hornet exploring through a new kingdom called Pharloom, all to great excitement by the fans. Due to the expanding scope of the game, what was once a DLC became a full sequel game. 

Small updates on Silksong, including art and information on new characters and locations, were shared by Team Cherry until December 2020, when the team went silent about the game, planting the seeds for the chaos that would surround the game for the next five years. 

From then on, fans of Hollow Knight would wait with anticipation during every video game news event in hope of getting more information on Silksong, only to be met, again and again, with nothing. This cycle spawned plenty of jokes. Both outsiders and fans themselves began to depict Silksong fans as clowns or delusional for their hope of information on the game when none had come for years. This naturally led into art of the main character Hornet, along with other Hollow Knight characters, dressed in a clown nose and rainbow wig as a way to represent the Silksong fans and their “delusional” fixation on the game. 

At times, the community folded in a much older meme, “The Cake Is A Lie,” from the Portal series, drawing Hornet with the infamous cake. The joke returns to embody the pursuit of an unobtainable yet alluring goal, harkening back to the state of Silksong as almost an internet-wide Schrodinger’s Cat, both real and fake at the same time. 

The only news during this period came in a small trailer shown in June 2022’s Xbox & Bethesda Game Showcase. This came with the promise that the game would release within 12 months, but on May 13th, 2023, Team Cherry declared Silksong had been delayed in spite of original plans to release it that year.

And so, the clowning continued… 

All until a Nintendo Direct on April 2nd, 2025 showed a new trailer for Silksong. The fandom roared to life, chanting that Silksong was still real. Hornet threw off her clown wig across social media in celebration, only helped when Team Cherry gave a release date of September 4th, 2025 the following month. 

And when the day finally came, the long-dedicated fans showed their love for the game. When it officially released at 10 AM EDT, the digital game marketplace Steam, along with other marketplaces like the Nintendo Eshop, the Microsoft Store, and the Playstation Store, all crashed as many people rushed to buy the game. By September twelfth, the game had sold 3.2 million copies on Steam alone, according to GameDiscoverCo. The crashes were resolved but only served to be a loud declaration of people’s love for Hollow Knight and its sequel.

But now that Silksong has finally come to us and we have cast our clown suits aside, one question hangs. Why did it take so long?

Very simply, Team Cherry was having fun.

Team Cherry is a small team of only three people, and three people who enjoy making their games very much, so with the success of Hollow Knight, they just kept expanding its successor till it grew from an expansion to a game that rivals, or even exceeds, the scope of the original. So they just kept building on the game, during which they made the decision to minimize how much they spoke of Silksong’s development as to not oversaturate the space with information and eventually leave fans burnt out on the game before it even would release. To quote Ari Gibson during an interview with Bloomberg, “We felt like continued updates were just going to sour people on the whole thing. Because all we could really say is, ‘We’re still working on it.’”

As a side effect, this meant the team’s energies could be fully focused on developing their game, instead of diverting energy to making trailers or demos. 

In the grand scheme of things, the time frame it took Hollow Knight: Silksong to be developed is long, but not out of the ordinary. Again, Team Cherry is a small but dedicated team. Let’s look at another indie game, Cuphead, which has a similarly unique, hand-drawn art style. The full development spanned from 2010 to the game’s 2017 release. The main difference was the development team expanded to up to 35 people working on the game in the later parts of development. Meanwhile, Silksong remained with the three  person team and there is no information on other people joining the main development team during that period, so it’s not hard to understand that the game did need that development time when looking at the game’s scale and the team’s size. 

In the aforementioned interview with Bloomberg, Team Cherry stated that they do believe they could have spent even more time working on the game, but made the decision to call things done. The Co-Director of Team Cherry and lead artist, Ari Gibson, even stated that he had to stop drawing because if he didn’t “…this [Hollow Knight: Silksong] is going to take 15 years to finish.” The development length mainly came from a place of passion and love for the game rather than any real issues behind the scenes within Team Cherry. 

With Silksong hovering in the area of 90% and 9/10 stars from most reviewers, it seems it was worth the nearly seven year wait. Despite all the clown imagery used by the fans time and time again and a fair amount of teasing, there turned out to be no clowns in the end with Hollow Knight: Silksong. Fans received a wonderful and highly anticipated game that is already being hailed as a decade defining release. All the while, Team Cherry were allowed to produce their game at a comfortable and sustainable rate, being rewarded in the end for their ethical business practices. All together creating a healthy ecosystem around Silksong that we can only hope will become closer to the standard.

And hey, if it means the gaming landscape has even more games as beautiful as Silksong, I think I could stand to wait seven years for a few more games.

…ok actually, I’m not that patient! How about five years?