Summary
An old interview with Team Cherry from 2018 that’s resurfaced over the past few days indicates thatHollow Knightwas originally only planned to be “like two hours or something” before itsKickstarterblew up.
Over the past few years, you’re able to’t even breathe in the space of an indie game without someone, somewhereasking the question that’s on all of our minds - “where’s Hollow Knight: Silksong?”. That eternal query has been a bit of a joke for a while considering how long the game has taken,but it looks like it’s finally happening at some point in 2025.
While we all wait for our hearts to be collectively broken again by Silksong slipping out of this year, there’s not been all that much news regarding Hollow Knight to share. All eyes are on Silksong, like they’ve been for some time now, but that hasn’t stopped an interesting tidbit about the original Hollow Knight’s development from slipping through the cracks.
Hollow Knight Was Originally Going To Be Much Shorter
Two Hours Seems Wild Considering The Final Game’s Length
As reported by GamesRadar+,Source Gaming recently uploaded an interview that it actually conducted all the way back at BitSummit 2018, one year after Hollow Knight launched on PC and before it came to the Nintendo Switch. The interview has been kept in Source Gaming’s “vault” for some time, but it’s finally been shared.
The interview covers a range of topics, from the process of localising Hollow Knight, what NES games inspired them, and what it means to be an “indie” developer, but the highlight is to do with Hollow Knight’s history with Kickstarter. For those that don’t know,Hollow Knight originally started as a Kickstarter project, one that blew up quickly and ended up raising nearly $58,000.
During the interview, Team Cherry co-directors Ari Gibson and William Pellen are asked about Hollow Knight’s budget and how much it made during the Kickstarter process, which was much more than anyone had planned. Gibson says the goal was originally $35,000 because Team Cherry wanted to make a smaller Metroidvania and thought that would be enough.
And then the success of the campaign allowed us to make it a level bigger. 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. - Ari Gibson
In fact, Hollow Knight was originally going to be much smaller than it ended up being, as Pellen notes that the game was only planned to be “like two hours or something” when the Kickstarter went live. Gibson notes that the success of the campaign allowed Team Cherry to make the game a “level bigger”, before the raised money allowed them to work for even longer and make it bigger again.
