Hollow Knight Was Almost a 2-Hour Game with a Much Smaller Kickstarter Goal

Hollow Knight is one of those rare games that hit the sweet spot between critical acclaim and cult obsession. It’s become a benchmark for the Metroidvania genre, influencing everything from tiny indies to AAA design, and it's still constantly referenced anytime someone talks about precision platforming, deep lore, or indie game triumphs. But originally? It was supposed to be a tiny, low-budget side-project that you could finish in a couple of hours. No joke.

In a freshly published 2018 interview from Straight from the Source, Team Cherry co-directors Ari Gibson and William Pellen spilled the details on just how small their ambitions were when starting out. The game’s Kickstarter goal was set at AU$35,000, but even that seemed high to them at the time. In fact, they considered cutting $5,000 off the goal just days before launch, simply because the original vision was so compact.

“That number was to create a Metroidvania that was very small,” Gibson said. “It was really like a small thing.”

Pellen chimed in, saying their early design would’ve made the entire game about two hours long. Imagine blasting through the entire kingdom of Hallownest in one sitting. That’s the scale they had in mind.

But things shifted pretty quickly. Thanks to strong community support and a better-than-expected Kickstarter run, Hollow Knight raised around $58,000, which gave Team Cherry enough breathing room to expand the scope—and then expand it again. Gibson said it let them “make it a level bigger,” and when paired with some additional help from Indie Fund, they managed to work on the game full-time for two years, slowly turning what was supposed to be a minimalist Metroidvania into one of the most ambitious and beloved indies of the decade.

That "go bigger" mindset didn’t stop there. Hollow Knight: Silksong, the sequel that’s become the ultimate “where is it?” title in gaming, seems to be following a similar growth path. Back in 2023, marketing rep Matthew Griffin said the game had been delayed because it had gotten “quite big.” Considering we’ve only seen tiny fragments of the game since, that may have been putting it lightly.

Now that Silksong has resurfaced for the Nintendo Switch 2 (yes, it’s happening), anticipation is once again climbing. Xbox is still promising a day-one Game Pass release, and fans are collectively holding their breath for the next trailer, update, or—dare we say it—release date.

The most wholesome part of all this? Team Cherry didn’t scale up with corporate money or some massive publisher push. They just had a modest dream, a bit of luck, and a community that saw potential. What started as a "maybe we should lower the budget" kind of game ended up becoming a Metroidvania classic. It's one of the few indie success stories that actually feels earned—through vision, risk-taking, and a whole lot of post-Kickstarter elbow grease.