Pellen and Gibson met 15 years ago through mutual friends, but didn’t start working together until shortly before Hollow Knight’s development, when they began entering game jams together. (Well, two game jams, to be precise.)Īri Gibson (left) and William Pellen (right) The Pale Knight Rises In just its first two weeks on Switch, Hollow Knight sold more than 250,000 copies, adding Team Cherry to the growing list of indie developers finding success on Nintendo’s handheld a marketplace not yet flooded like Steam or the App Store.Īnd it all began with a game jam. Hollow Knight’s PC, Mac, and Linux release passed the 1 million units sold threshold the day before the Switch launch – a milestone that took 15 months to reach. “The game is built upon our love of classic Nintendo games, so this is the peak of a 30-year cycle: growing up playing them, gaining enough skills to create our own homage to those games, and releasing it on the same platform that inspired us in the first place.” “But mainly it was amazing.”Īri Gibson, Hollow Knight’s art supervisor, co-director, and the other half of Team Cherry’s beating heart adds that seeing Hollow Knight on the Switch is still “surreal” for them. “It was amazing! Kinda scary, too, because it was our launch day and we were all the way in Los Angeles, so far from our office,” Pellen says. The Reggie he’s referring to is, of course, Mr. Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, who, at E3 2018, took valuable moments out of the company’s presentation to help sell the dream of a tiny Adelaide-based indie developer.

That’s William Pellen, Hollow Knight’s game designer, co-director of the studio, and half of Team Cherry’s creative core. “I was spying on Hollow Knight’s Discord to watch the community’s real-time reactions, and when I saw someone type in, ‘Reggie said the words Hollow Knight, I can’t believe it!’ I burst out laughing. Team Cherry has more than a little in common with Hollow Knight – a game that propelled its creators from obscurity, to moderate Kickstarter success, to glowing reviews, to the top of the Nintendo Switch charts in a whirlwind few years. A diminutive, seemingly unremarkable champion answers the call to adventure, delving into the unknown, travelling further with each skill acquired, with each battle conquered.

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