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* Seer's voice *

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William Pellen and Ari Gibson.

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If you are regular to my channel

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the names probably sound familiar.

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These are the two man responsible for the creation of Hollow Knight.

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But how well do you really know the members of Team Cherry?

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What skeletons take up residence in their closets?

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It's time we stop pretending that Team Cherry is harmless.

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As the Knight of Great Renown once said,

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"Nothing...is harmless." - Zote

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There are many places we could start with the story of Team Cherry.

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Like four hundred and twelve million years ago

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when bugs first walked the Earth.

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Or even 1901, when Australia gained independence from Great Britain.

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Or maybe 1945, when Great Britain gained independence from Austrail...

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Or maybe 1945, when Great Britain gained independence from Australian exports.

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Instead we're going to start here.

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This is Return to Booty Grotto.

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It was posted to Newgrounds on October 12th, 2012

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by a man named William Pellen,

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making this his first game ever published on the Internet.

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Return to Booty Grotto revolves around Finn the Fish

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a goldfish with a bowler hat

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who is given a treasure map by his grandpa.

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The game itself isn't terrible. You basically navigate through Booty Grotto

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collecting fish and avoiding enemies and traps.

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Unfortunately, Finn is the most pathetic protagonist ever to be featured in a game

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on account of the fact that bumping into walls kills him, instantly.

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The lore explanation for this is that Finn JUST ATE.

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Seems legit.

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Now you might be wondering if this game has any similarities to Hollow Knight.

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Well yes, actually.

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First off the game has a bestiary,

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filled with deep and rich lore, about each of the characters.

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On top of that the game also features jellyfish, as well as,

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bees?

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And then there's, oh god.

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* Sound of Silence plays *

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* Finn dies *

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Return to Booty Grotto has multiple endings

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much like Hollow Knight.

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In one ending, Finn rescues a random fish named Gilly

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that was locked up inside a treasure chest by a giant angler fish.

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In another ending, he becomes a king because he found some random orbs in a temple.

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And in the last ending he goes to outer space,

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reaches the end of the universe,

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experiences a cosmic event

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reawakens in the ocean, opens an ancient chest

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finds a piece of bubblegum

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blows a bubble big enough to encase his entire body and then flies off into space, never to be seen again.

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I'm pretty sure this is the canonical ending

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Anyway, Return to Booty Grotto was actually a sequel to Booty Grotto,

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a game made by another one of William's friends:

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some guy named Brad.

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At the time, William was making video games as a hobby, while working as a web designer.

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William had been in love with video games ever since

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his dad showed him how to find the boots in Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link.

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Because despite popular belief, Zelda 2 isn't actually terrible.

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On May 12th, 2013

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William posted a demo for his new game, Lulanda

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on stencil.com.

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Stencil is a program that allows users to develop small flash and mobile games

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without having to have an insane knowledge of code.

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Lulanda is a 2D platformer that takes inspiration from Super Mario World,

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Alex Kidd, and Zelda 2.

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The game revolves around a little deer, girl thing

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trying to collect some, other, things for some reason.

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The first level takes place in Onion Valley

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where everyone is made of onions.

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And of course, there are buzzsaws.

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I'm starting to think that William has an unhealthy obsession with these things.

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There's also a shop in the game that features a plush toy of Finn,

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along with some other random characters.

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Are these from other games that William had ideas for?

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I for one would love to play as a floppy ear dog or an angry... booger.

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William put a lot of time into Lulanda

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posting another demo to Newgrounds in October.

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At this point, William was experiencing issues with Stencil being unable to handle the size of his game.

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Lulanda would need to be developed in a different engine

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if William wanted to keep working on it.

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Buuut that's enough about William Pellen. We all know why we're here.

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You wanna hear about Ari Gibson, and his beautiful sweater.

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Before Hollow Knight, Ari was working in animation

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While both William and Ari had experienced animation

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Ari had worked on several animation projects by this point.

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Ari worked for The People's Republic of Animation

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working on animation for a wide variety of mediums,

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from TV specials and short films, to commercials and even video games.

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Remember that breathtaking ending cutscene in the 2008 Nintendo Wii game De Blob?

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Well, that animation was produced by The People's Republic of Animation

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and directed by Ari Gibson himself.

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Ari also worked on such amazing titles as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

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and Megamind: Mega Team Unite.

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In 2012, Ari founded Mechanical Apple with Jason Pamment.

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Together, the two worked on a number of animation projects

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including music video for The Audreys and

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Go yeet? Go - Tie? Agh, Jesus...

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* mossbag typing *

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Go-Tea-Ah

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There's a playlist in the description below

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of all the animation Ari's worked on that I can find

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so go check that out.

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Ari's love for video games began with Faxanadu

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which plays very similarly with Zelda 2

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but it isn't a Zelda game so no one has heard of it.

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William and Ari eventually started talking about the idea of working on games together.

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The two had met through friends, several years ago

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but it wasn't till mid-way through 2013 that they began making games together.

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William sent Ari a copy of Lulanda

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and the two decided to start participating in game jams.

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Rohan Fraser, a friend that Ari had met through work,

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also joined in on the fun.

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These were the three original members of Team Cherry

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and in August, they entered their very first game jam:

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Ludum Dare 27.

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Ludum Dare is a game jam event that occurs multiple times a year.

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In a game jam, participants are given a short amount of time to put together a game from scratch.

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It's basically a way for developers to flex their creativity,

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and practice working together under stress.

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Ludum Dare 27 began on August 23rd, 2013,

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and gave teams 72 hours to make a game based on the theme of "10 seconds".

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Over the course of three days

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William, Ari and Rohan, created a game called Hungry Knight.

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In Hungry Knight the player plays as this... thing,

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and is tasked with killing 3 masked...

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and is tasked with killing 3 masked... bears?

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in order to revive the player character's friend.

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However, if the Knight doesn't eat a cherry every 10 seconds, they die,

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also their friend is revived as a skeleton?

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T-that doesn't make sense.

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Hungry Knight was the inception for a lot of what Team Cherry has become.

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The name Team Cherry actually comes from the cherries found in this game

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and obviously, they reused the design of the Hungry Knight in this game

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for Dung Defender in Hollow Knight

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Hollow Knight also borrow the idea of killing 3 masked beings from Hungry Knight as well.

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So it-it's basically the same game, guys.

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Less than a month after creating Hungry Knight,

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Team Cherry participated in another game jam:

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Indie Speedrun 2013.

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While they missed the deadline for the game jam,

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Team Cherry still put together a game: Tomb Cat.

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Tomb Cat is about a mother of three kittens

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that makes money by grave robbing Egyptian temples.

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There are three different temples with a varying number of rooms.

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The goal is to collect as much money as you can

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without running out of time in any room or dying.

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This would be Team Cherry's last game before development on Hollow Knight finally began.

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During this time, Ari continued to work on animation for Mechanical Apple.

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In March of 2014, Mechanical Apple released Motorbike

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a short film about a kid who's trying to make it to a date on time.

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What's interesting about this film is that the music was done by none other

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than Christopher Larkin.

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Chris and Ari had worked on a few projects together,

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but Chris would later go on to produce the beautiful score found in Hollow Knight.

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Another cool thing about this film is that it was actually selected as a Disney favorite,

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and was featured on Disney's Youtube channel.

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So there's a nice bit of riveting Hollow Knight trivia for you to share on your next social gathering.

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Ari also continue to hold a fascination towards the character from Hungry Knight.

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Ari even drew concept art featuring the "Hungry bug" as it was called at this point.

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Ari named the 1985 OVA "Angel's Egg" as one of his main inspiration of the art in Hollow Knight,

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and you can definitely see the connection:

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the dark colors, the faded cities, shells in the walls.

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This also means that Ari is canonically a weeb.

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Hollow Knight finally began to take shape in April, 2014.

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It was Ludum Dare 29

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and the theme was "Beneath the Surface".

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Team Cherry came up with the idea of a ruined bug kingdom

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where players would start in town, and then head down a well into the darkness below.

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This is the first piece of art ever made for Hollow Knight.

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Using bugs for characters made it easier to draw and animate them quickly.

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Dark colors also help to obscure rushed artwork.

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In other words, many of the inspirations of Hollow Knight were born out of convenience.

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Team Cherry didn't submit anything for Ludum Dare 29,

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but they held on to this game, deciding it was time to take the next step.

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Team Cherry ripped the Knight's sprites from Hungry Knight,

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and gutted the code from Lulanda to begin development on Hungry Knight 2.

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Of course, this name didn't stick around for long.

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Team Cherry decided to change it after realizing that the Knight doesn't really eat anything anymore.

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They decided on Hollow Knight, because

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well, the Knight looked hollow,

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I guess.

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During the original game jam, Team Cherry came up with the idea that some of the rooms would shift positions

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sort of like a roguelike.

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This would change the order in which players would collect upgrades and items.

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Team Cherry gave it up because it was confusing,

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and really screwed up any kind of narrative they tried to make

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and trust me, the narrative is already confusing enough

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without the world changing shape every playthrough.

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For about 5 or 6 months before the Kickstarter in November, 2014,

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William and Ari worked on their new game

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At some point during all of this, Rohan Fraser made his exit from Team Cherry.

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From what I can tell, Ari and William had both quit their jobs

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and dedicated most of their time to working on Hollow Knight.

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Rohan might not have been willing to take that plunge,

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and who could blame him.

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I assume living in Australia is scary enough without being unemployed too.

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Like I said earlier, Rohan worked with Ari in animation

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and he has been working on his own comic book series called Blokkan.

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November 18, 2014 was the day Hollow Knight finally landed on Kickstarter.

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What's interesting is that Team Cherry never consciously labelled their game as a metroidvania.

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Regardless, Hollow Knight does draw a lot of inspiration from the genre.

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Team Cherry openly admits that Metroid and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrows inspired them when creating Hollow Knight.

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But they also list other games as well, such as Zelda 2

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and Faxanadu.

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They also cite Megaman X as an inspiration for the movement and controls.

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The charm system was based on the badge system from Paper Mario.

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They also cite Pikmin at some point,

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but I don't really know how? or um...

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Why?

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And yes, there is a bit of Dark Souls in there as well.

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They have implied that the corpse run mechanic is at least somewhat inspired by Dark Souls

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While Dark Souls isn't the first game to do this,

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they definitely brought the mechanic into the mainsteam.

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In terms of story and lore, Team Cherry has never said

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anything about being inspired by Dark Souls,

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which is suspicious.

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I mean, the White Lady is basically one giant pair of tits away from basically being Gwynevere, but whatever.

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Team Cherry also said that the soul mechanic in Hollow Knight took inspiration form the rally mechanic in Bloodborne.

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After taking hit in Bloodborne,

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the player has the opportunity to regain their lost health

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by dealing damage to an enemy.

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But after a short period of time, this opportunity vanishes.

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So yeah, when it comes to inspiration for Hollow Knight,

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I think William said it best:

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William: "We've stolen a lot of ideas"

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Dude: "Hey, well that's the way to do it"

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The Kickstarter goal for Hollow Knight was $35,000 Australian.

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Pledge rewards included stuff like signed artwork,

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dream characters, dream warriors

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NPCs, bosses, dungeons

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and there was even a slot for a backer village.

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Some of this content is still waiting to be added in the Hornet DLC.

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Hollow Knight didn't get officially funded until December 15,

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just three days before the Kickstarter ended.

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There was a huge ramp up right at the end, closing out the

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final funding figure at over 57,000 dollarydoos.

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After the dust settled,

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and late Paypal payments were added up,

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five Kickstarter stretch goals had been reached,

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including a Wii U port

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and an additional playable character.

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With their new piles of cash, Team Cherry got themselves a nice little office in downtown Adelaide.

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It was time to get serious about developing Hollow Knight into a fully fledged game.

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That meant ditching Stencil once and for all.

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If Hollow Knight is going to be ported to the Wii U,

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the game was going to need to be built in a new engine.

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Team Cherry decided on Unity,

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bringing in Dave Kozi to help them out.

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Dave was an experienced programmer and knew his way around Unity,

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and when comparing the game in both engines

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it's pretty obvious that they made the right choice.

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Around March, 2015, Team Cherry commissioned Christopher Larkin to compose the soundtrack for Hollow Knight.

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Everything was coming together, but there was a lot of work left to do.

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The original plan was to release Hollow Knight in June, 2015.

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The game was originally intended to only be two or three hours long.

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Needless to say, the game ended up being a TAD bigger than that.

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It wasn't that Team Cherry had to redo the whole game

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or scrap a whole bunch of stuff or anything like that.

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The base idea was that there would be three guardians that the player would have to defeat

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in order to fight the final boss.

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And we can see this design in the final game

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but Team Cherry just kept adding more and more.

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There were originally going to be only three areas that branched out of the Forgotten Crossroads:

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the Fungal Wastes

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the Ruined City

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and the Bone Forest

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They wanted to add another section to the Forgotten Crossroads,

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so we got the Crystal Peaks.

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The Fungal Wastes was broken into several different areas,

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such as Greenpath, the Fog Canyon.

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and the Queen's Gardens

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The Bone Forest was moved down to the bottom of the map,

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so Team Cherry created Deepnest to connect it better to the world.

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Unfortunately, the Forest of Bones was cut,

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but was replaced with the Ancient Basin.

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The Blue Lake was added at some point so that the rain in the City of Tears actually made sense,

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and Kingdom's Edge was added to contain the Hive and other loose ends that were left over.

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By the end,

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The map was HUGE, with a huge variety of locations and enemies.

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The entire map of Hollow Knight is comprised of black squares

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that are dressed up with 2D hand-drawn artwork.

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The art and animation was done almost exclusively in Photoshop.

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Ideas for enemies usually began on a whiteboard, or on paper,

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and it didn't take long to bring those drawings to life.

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A boss could be conceived and animated in about a week,

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and a regular enemy could be animated in as fast as 40 minutes,

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and programmed in another 40 minutes.

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Unity allowed Team Cherry to layer artwork to make it look more dynamic as well.

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William used Playmaker as a way to program the AI for enemies in the game.

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Apparently this came with some headaches

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as variables would randomly switch on enemies.

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According to Ari, this happened constantly throughout the game's development.

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This image shows the programming for the Hollow Knight boss battle,

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showing how complicated these things can get.

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I think most everyone can agree that the music in Hollow Knight is absolutely amazing,

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but it took a lot of work from Chris Larkin and Team Cherry to make this happen.

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The majority of the music was based around a viola and a piano,

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and Larkin implemented leitmotifs into the game

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by using certain melodies in multiple parts of the game,

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to strengthen narrative connections.

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The soundtrack was refined over the course of Hollow Knight's two year development,

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giving Team Cherry plenty of time to work with Larkin,

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to make sure that each area of the game had the perfect music to match.

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Most of the voices were done by William, Ari and Makoto Koji.

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Makoto Koji shares an office with Team Cherry

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where she runs her own art and animation studio, Paper Rabbits

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and her animation is really good, guys.

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It may not be as good as my brief foray animation,

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but you have to start somewhere, I guess.

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Makoto did about 90% of the female voices in Hollow Knight, including Hornet,

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the Mantis Lords, Seer,

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and uh, Flukemarm.

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Many other voices were provided by friends and family.

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I've included a list in the description of all the known voices that Team Cherry has confirmed.

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The lore for Hollow Knight was something that developed organically.

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Team Cherry always knew the basic structure of the plot,

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but they left a lot open so that the lore didn't dictate the contents of the game.

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The script is written in a google spreadsheet by both William and Ari,

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towards the end of development.

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With all the extra work Team Cherry put into expanding the world of Hallownest,

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the game didn't actually come out until February 24, 2017.

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This was two years after the Kickstarter, and overshot Team Cherry's planned release date by over 18 months.

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They ended up having to take a loan to help cover the cost of making the game.

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After all was set and done, the game took about ninety

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to a hundred thousand dollars to produce,

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which is an insanely small amount of money to make a game on.

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I mean, I don't even get out of bed for a hundred thousand dollars.

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As Hollow Knight's launch crept closer,

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Team Cherry hired Matthew Griffin, or Leth,

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to handle PR and Marketing.

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Leth's primary method of marketing Hollow Knight was to send it to streamers,

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allowing the game to spread through word of mouth.

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He also worked with Fan Gamer to release Hollow Knight merch,

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and scheduled interviews with news outlets.

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So if you're watching this Leth,

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please get in touch with me,

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because I have a few questions for Team Cherry that I would like to ask.

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Hollow Knight was a sleeping success.

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Unfortunately, the game released right before Horizon Zero Dawn and Breath of the Wild,

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the two biggest games of the year,

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so it got a little lost in the shuffle.

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I didn't even know about Hollow Knight until I saw it in a video by

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some obscure Youtuber going by the name "videogamedunkey".

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But as time has gone on, more and more people have realized how amazing this game is.

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The Hollow Knight subreddit now has almost 40,000 members.

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When the game released on Switch,

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it sold a quarter of a million copies in two weeks.

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The game also passed a million sales on steam back in July, 2018.

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And it's really popular in Utah, I guess.

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That's when you know you've made it.

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And before long, Hollow Knight will be taught in schools,

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alongside other great classics such as the Odyssey,

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and Superman 4 The Quest for Peace.

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Since the release of Hollow Knight

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Team Cherry has seen a few small changes.

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Dave Kazi left to work at some big company,

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and Team Cherry picked up Jack Vine to fill his role.

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There are no actual photos of Jack, and he's not even in Team Cherry's "About" page.

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I have a theory that he doesn't actually exist,

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and that Team Cherry made him up for tax purposes.

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Work on Hollow Knight has continued since its initial release.

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Team Cherry worked with Jump Shark studios to rework the game's code

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so that it could run on the Nintendo Switch.

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The game was also released on Switch at E3 2018,

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and on PS4 and Xbox One, later that September.

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Team Cherry has also released three content packs,

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or four if you count Lifeblood as a content pack,

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which Team Cherry does,

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but they still haven't updated it in the game, so I have to say 'three'.

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Team Cherry is currently working on the Hornet DLC,

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and then after that, Hollow Knight will finally be complete,

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and this channel will pivot to the next logical step:

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Teletubbies lore.

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And that's the story of Team Cherry.

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I hope this video was enlightening for you,

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or maybe even a little inspiring.

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To think that such an amazing game was put together by just three people.

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It really is amazing how much indie developers can do nowadays.

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All that matters is that you have talent,

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willpower and maybe a little luck.

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And I'm so glad Team Cherry met those requirements.

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Thank you Team Cherry, Thank you

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Now hurry up and release the Hornet DLC you lazy firemen