Storefronts pulled down for hours. Hundreds of thousands of people actively playing on day one, before the work day is even over. Years and years of built-up hype. Whether Hollow Knight: Silksong turns out to be good is irrelevant now; the highly-anticipated Metroidvania is already a success. This feat might explain why Silksong fans are currently sharing a very old Reddit post from a decade ago, when wider gaming audiences first learned about the humble game being developed by a duo hailing from Australia. “Last year my best friend quit his full time job to chase his dream and make a fully fledged video game,” the Reddit title reads. “Today he just released a trailer and it looks beyond amazing.”
In case it’s not obvious, the thread was sharing an early trailer for Hollow Knight, two years before its eventual 2017 release. Though it mostly featured early enemies in the starting areas of the game, the sneak peek did a decent job of showing off Hollow Knight‘s somber vibe and its unique, bug-infested setting. That thread, succinct as it was, hit the big time. It was the number two story on r/all for a while after it was posted, which meant that it had a potential audience reach of more than 120 million people.
When the thread was confined to its initial audience on r/gaming, the response was positive. But once it hit the mainstream, things took a turn in the thread, according to the original poster. Suddenly, the thread was rife with naysayers.
“I watched the trailer and still felt like it was yet another side scroller puzzle platformer combat game with rpg elements that I’ve seen numerous times now,” reads one highly-upvoted comment.
“What am I supposed to be excited about?” it later continued.
The negativity was a sentiment that started infesting the thread, and the chatter around the game devolved into arguing about over whether or not this unknown indie game really stood a chance.
“I’m sure its a fine game, but the market is currently saturated with side-scrolling platformers so I feel his game may not do as good as he hopes,” another commenter opined. “It looks like any other platform game,” declares the third most popular comment.
It wasn’t all haters judging Hollow Knight harshly; ostensibly some people were just trying to be objective. “It’s a genre that is very hard to stand out in,” one commenter said.
And it’s true: In 2015 alone, Steam saw slightly more than 2,800 releases. That’s almost eight new games a day. Granted, Hollow Knight didn’t come out for another couple of years, but the number of new titles competing for attention only became more exponential with each passing year.
But let’s dig deeper into the specific year that this discussion transpired. On the whole, 2015 was a terrific year for game releases: There was the generation-defining Arkham Knight, the extremely influential Witcher 3, and the return of the Fallout franchise. Yet as far as some indie games were concerned, things were looking grim. This was a few years after the shutdown of Xbox Live Arcade, which arguably started a revolution that gave rise to classics like Braid and Super Meat Boy. The free-to-play model had staked its flag on the industry, a pivot that even some big budget studios weren’t fully accustomed to. On r/gamedev, terrified creators were coming together to discuss a potential “indiepocalypse” that was threatening the survival of small games.
“Making a good game isn’t even enough anymore,” one exasperated game developer wrote at the time. Even if some people recognized there was something special at the core of Hollow Knight in 2015, there was no guarantee it would go on to eclipse the games that its genre is named after. There’s an equally plausible timeline where Hollow Knight didn’t get the recognition it deserved, and it would have nothing to do with the quality of the game, nor would it have reflected the heart of the developers making it. Case in point: The thread that catapulted Hollow Knight in front of a massive audience is phrased in a way that’s since become its own genre of marketing on Reddit. I see posts like these nearly every week, often for projects that don’t seem promising at first glance.
Ten years later, though, we all know how things turned out for Hollow Knight, a game that is now unironically referred to as Grand Theft Auto 6 of indie games. The environment receiving Silksong is completely different. It’s other indie games that have to contend with standing out against Hollow Knight, and that’s especially true for the smaller studios working on games inspired by the goth Metroidvania. Never mind the similar games that Hollow Knight has overshadowed across the years already, like Nine Sols.
We can poke fun at the haters who couldn’t see the vision because, unlike so many indie games that never make it, Hollow Knight‘s story had a happy ending. The original poster who opened up the discourse floodgates a decade ago can thus upload another thread for Silksong with a wink.
“Ten years my best friend quit his full time job to chase his dream and make a fully fledged video game,” the 2025 thread reads. “He released a trailer and it looks beyond amazing.”
This time around, everyone is in on the joke.
“Honestly, with all the side scrolling platformers out there, I’m not sure if your friend’s game is going to take off,” reads the top comment. “But I wish him luck.”
