The History of Hollow Knight and its Success

Hollow Knight is a video game falling into the platformer/metroidvania genre (a genre of video games consisting of one large area to explore as opposed to separate levels). It was released in 2017 and developed by a small group called Team Cherry, only consisting of three core members. The main premise of the game is that you play as a silent protagonist exploring the kingdom of Hallownest, with the bugs inhabiting the kingdom appearing to have been infected by a sort of supernatural disease. Since its release, Hollow Knight has gone onwards to sell over fifteen million copies of the game. This article will go through the several details of the game that has made it so successful to this day.

First off, it’s worth noting that Hollow Knight was originally a project in Unity funded in 2014 through the website Kickstarter, through which people donate small amounts of money to a project to help the developers. This was crucial in beginning the development of the game, as Team Cherry greatly needed these funds due to being such a small development team. However, despite being such a small team, using the funds, they were able to efficiently split the work across the three people, with one person drawing the art and characters of the game, one person working on the game design as well as the concepts, and a coder to ensure everything worked properly. They also made sure to provide regular updates across the two years of development to assure the Kickstarter backers that things were going well.

Then, during February 2017, Team Cherry released the first version of Hollow Knight on Steam. Players loved the game, its creative enemies and bosses, the orchestral music soundtrack, the subtle worldbuilding that immersed the player into the game, and so much more. The gameplay involved exploring many areas, collecting upgrades for your character, fighting unpredictable bosses that threatened to end your journey where you stood, and best of all, finding out about the dark past of the kingdom of Hallownest and how it ended up in its sad state.

However, while the game was well received upon release, players noticed several performance issues as well as glitches and bugs (no pun intended). Receiving the feedback from their fans, Team Cherry got to work and immediately began patching these glitches, hoping to get their game to the best it could be.

By 2018, Team Cherry had fixed many bugs and added multiple new features, bosses and even entire quests in the game, thus making players who had already played the game want to at this point. At this point, Hollow Knight had also released for Xbox and Playstation, which meant it got even more sales, and more players began discovering this game.

Then, in 2019, Team Cherry put out another Kickstarter campaign for completely new DLC, where you could play as a character originally appearing in Hollow Knight as a boss, called Hornet. This character was very popular among the players of Hollow Knight due to the complexity of their character, so this got them very excited. However, Team Cherry instead decided to scrap the idea of it being a DLC, and instead put out a trailer for this idea as a full-fledged sequel starring Hornet called Hollow Knight: Silksong, and after this announcement, Hollow Knight’s sales started skyrocketing as new players wanted to see if Hollow Knight was a good enough game to have a sequel, with many people agreeing that it was. And yet, to this day, Silksong is yet to release, being set to release on the 4^th of September this year, with many people replaying Hollow Knight to prepare for the sequel.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Hollow Knight is only priced $14.99, meaning it wasn’t too expensive to repel any new players wanting to try the game. Overall, it’s legitimately impressive how a small team of just three people was able to create a game so influential to the gaming community.