Explaining the Internet’s obsession with Silksong, which (finally) comes out Sept. 4

Hollow Knight: Silksong will be released on September 4. It will come out simultaneously on Windows, macOS, Linux, Xbox, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, the Nintendo Switch, and the Nintendo Switch 2.

On paper, “game gets release date” isn’t particularly groundbreaking news, and the six-year wait between the game’s announcement and release is long but nowhere near record-breaking. People have waited longer for Metroid Prime 4 (announced 2017, releasing this fall), Duke Nukem Forever (announced 1997, released 2011), the fourth BioShock game (in development for a decade at a studio that just got ravaged by layoffs), and Half-Life 3 (never actually announced, but hope springs eternal), just to name a few.

But fans of 2017’s Hollow Knight managed to make the wait for Silksong into a meme. It’s hard to explain why if you haven’t already been following along, but it’s probably got something to do with the expected scale of the game, the original Hollow Knight‘s popularity, and the almost total silence of the small staff at Team Cherry, the game’s developer.

Why does this game make people act this way?

Silksong began development as downloadable content for Hollow Knight, a gloomy Metroidvania about a silent, unnamed protagonist battling their way through the fallen insect kingdom of Hallownest. Funded via Kickstarter, Hollow Knight became a huge hit thanks to its distinctive 2D art style, atmospheric soundtrack, sharp and satisfying gameplay, memorable boss fights, and worldbuilding that gave players just enough information to encourage endless speculation about Hallownest’s rise and fall.

The expansion, first mentioned all the way back in 2014, would focus on Hornet, who fought her battles with a needle and thread. She had been an NPC in the main game but would become a fully playable character in the DLC.

By February of 2019, Team Cherry announced that the Hornet DLC had become “too large and too unique to stay a DLC” and would instead be “a full-scale sequel to Hollow Knight.”

And then, silence. Hollow Knight had been developed mostly out in the open, with a steady cadence of updates posted to Kickstarter about the game and its DLC. But whatever was going on with Silksong was happening behind closed doors. Status updates came, at best, once or twice a year, and usually amounted to “they’re still working on it.”

Since then, Hollow Knight has only become a bigger hit, and Silksong has only gotten more anticipated. Team Cherry said Hollow Knight had sold 2.8 million copies as of early 2019 when the Silksong announcement went out. As of today, that number is over 15 million, and almost 5 million people have come together to make Silksong into Steam’s most-wishlisted game by a margin of nearly 2:1.

The first game’s popularity, sky-high expectations for the second game, and the near-total information vacuum meant that every single scrap of Silksong news, no matter how small, was pored over and picked apart by a constellation of Reddit threads and SEO-friendly news posts. People spotted and speculated about the significance of tiny Steam database updates, new listings in digital game stores, and purported ESRB ratings, trying to divine whether the game was getting any closer to release.

People could even make news out of a lack of news, an art form perfected by a DailySilksongNews channel on YouTube with hundreds of videos and 220,000 subscribers (“There has been no news to report for Silksong today,” host Cory M. deadpans in one of the channel’s typical update videos).

This cottage industry’s collective frustration hit a peak in mid 2023. At an Xbox game showcase in June of 2022, Silksong gameplay footage was included in a reel of games that were meant to be released “within the next 12 months.” In the 11th month of that 12-month wait, an update came down from Team Cherry: the game wouldn’t be out in the first half of 2023 after all, and there would be no updated estimate about its release window.

Since then, Silksong fans have descended upon every livestreamed game announcement that could possibly include a Silksong reveal, spamming clown memes and joking about how the game is just around the corner. I myself changed my Discord avatar to a picture of the Knight in a clown wig and red nose, temporarily, just until Silksong came out. This was over three years ago, and at this point I worry that changing the avatar to something else will confuse the people in my servers too much. The mask has become my face.

What took so long?

Patient and impatient Silksong fans alike will find some denouement in Jason Schreier’s Bloomberg interview with Team Cherry, in which the game’s developers break their silence on why the game took so long and why they communicated so little about it.

The prolonged development apparently didn’t come down to a lack of enthusiasm, or burnout, or staffing problems, or the pandemic, or any of the other things that have delayed so many other games. Team Cherry co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen say that the delay has been for the most wholesome reason possible: they were having so much fun making Silksong that it was hard to stop.

“You’re always working on a new idea, new item, new area, new boss,” Pellen told Bloomberg. “That stuff’s so nice. It’s for the sake of just completing the game that we’re stopping. We could have kept going.”

“I remember at some point I just had to stop sketching,” said Gibson. “Because I went, ‘Everything I’m drawing here has to end up in the game. That’s a cool idea, that’s in. That’s a cool idea, that’s in.’ You realize, ‘If I don’t stop drawing, this is going to take 15 years to finish.'”

In addition to over 200 distinct enemies and an all-new map, Silksong will build on Hollow Knight‘s progression and exploration by adding a new quest system that will encourage re-exploration of different areas of the map. The team had conceived of this as a way to add depth to what they originally expected would be a smaller world map than Hollow Knight‘s—but instead, they added that depth and then built a huge game around it anyway. Tying all of these ideas together and applying a consistent level of polish to them also added time to the process.

The game’s katamari-like growth apparently made it difficult to estimate when it would be done, and a desire to avoid spoiling the game for its future players meant that the team just ended up not talking about it much.

“There was a period of two to three years when I thought it was going to come out within a year,” said Pellen.

In the last few months, there’s been a growing sense that the game’s release was finally coming, for real this time. An Australian museum announced that it would be showcasing the game as part of an exhibit starting in September. Silksong was listed as a playable game for Microsoft and Asus’ Xbox-themed handheld ROG Ally PC, which itself just got a mid-October release date yesterday. News of a “special announcement” about Silksong went out on August 19, and we finally got our release date today.

Gibson and Pellen have mostly ignored the weird Internet subcultures that have developed around the game, though they are aware that those intense slices of their fanbase exist.

“Feels like we’re going to ruin their fun by releasing the game,” said Pellen.

Fans who have engaged in the sport of Waiting For Silksong will still have something to look forward to. Gibson and Pellen said that they plan to keep working on the game, and Silksong should see a fair amount of post-release DLC just like the original Hollow Knight did. But some of those plans are “ambitious,” and Team Cherry isn’t ready to talk about timing yet.

That means that even the game’s release isn’t going to stop a certain type of person on the Internet from asking their favorite question: Silksong when?