Team Cherry Explains Hollow Knight Silksong Development Cycle

When a video game is delayed, gamers are sad, but they’re not mad, per se. After all, they know that delays happen, and sometimes, the team needs a little extra time to “polish things up” and get them to a place where they need to be. When a game is continually delayed, that’s when fans have the “alarms” in their heads go off, because it’s clear that “something is wrong,” and they want to know what. In the case of Hollow Knight Silksong, this title by Team Cherry has been in development for basically seven years, and yesterday, we FINALLY found out that it’s arriving on consoles and PC on September 4th.

Yet, even with that hilariously done announcement, the question still remains, “Why did it take so long to release? Why were the delays so long?” The answer can be found in a special Bloomberg article/newsletter about the title, where the co-heads of Team Cherry, Ari Gibson and William Pellen, spoke about it. The irony in their minds is that while gamers and game critics/journalists were saying that the game was in “Development Hell,” it was the opposite in the minds of Team Cherry. For example, Ari Gibson noted:

“We’ve been having fun. This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It’s nice to make fun things.”

Gibson went on to make things even clearer by stating:

“It was never stuck or anything. 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.”

In fact, one of the big factors in the development was that the team itself was small, and they were having so much fun making things that by the time they got to the “refinement part,” they were now in the mindset that it had to be as perfect as possible so that their previous work wouldn’t be invalidated. William Pellen said:

“There’s a level of finish that has to be met throughout the entire game. All the way the systems interact, all the hidden work that pops up later on. It’s multiplicative. As you add stuff, the process of tying it all back together just increases.”

To be fair, even Team Cherry thought Hollow Knight Silksong would be out by now, but they got so wrapped up in making this game as big and fun as possible that it just took longer to make. Go figure.