Hornet, the protagonist of Hollow Knight: Silksong
With the start of Sept. 4, 2025, fans of the critically acclaimed series Hollow Knight were finally greeted with a game that has been teased for almost seven years.
The game was first announced at a showcase in February of 2019, it was slated to come out a few years later, which left fans very excited for the development of this game. But how did we get here?
It all began back on Nov. 19, 2014 with a Kickstarter, which is a fundraising website that was used in order to fund this game’s predecessor, Hollow Knight, created by Ari Gibson, William Pellen and Christopher Larkin. When Hollow Knight released on Feb. 24, 2017, it was received with critical acclaim, with many going so far as to say it was one of the best games of the decade. To this day it has sold roughly 15 million copies. The creators would then go on to continue small updates for the game, and as they promised within their Kickstarter, a second playable character.
Later on in 2018, it was announced that while in the process of making the second playable character for Hollow Knight, they realized the scope of their dreams were incredibly ambitious, and so they decided to move on with creating an entirely new game using this secondary playable character.
As time passed after the 2019 announcement, a large amount of radio silence began to occur as the developers never communicated with their community about the progress being done. As years went by, many began to suspect that they had entirely abandoned the project and no longer wanted anything to do with the franchise.
In 2022, a trailer was shown at an Xbox game showcase that promised that within a year, all games that were present would be available. Unfortunately for the fans, this never happened.
In summer of 2025, another trailer was shown, promising this time that the game would in fact come out in 2025. Many fans were hesitant, as there had been numerous false alarms and were therefore afraid of believing that this would finally happen, only to be surprised when Team Cherry (the team name for the creators of Hollow Knight) later released a trailer showing the release date of Hollow Knight: Silksong. Alongside this, they also published an interview where they covered a variety of topics.
Within this interview they addressed their lack of communication, and for many the reason was a shock: they were simply having too much fun creating the game and adding in new content that they just kept going. They never stopped working on the game simply because it was so enjoyable.
On Sept. 4th, 2025, Hollow Knight: Silksong was finally released, and on this day, server communications across every major console, Xbox, Play Station and Nintendo, were all halted due to the massive amounts of traffic. For several hours, people were unable to purchase the game, which only went to show just how popular this game had become.
Team Cherry plans to continue working on Silksong and hope that their fans will stick around to enjoy what it is they have in store for the community.