Hollow Knight: Silksong fans are so tired, an April Fools'-worthy release window for December, 9998 sat mostly unquestioned for a month
Team Cherry's successor to Hollow Knight, Silksong, will be released eventually. Probably. Maybe, we can hope. When it's done. Soon™. The thing's been delayed so much it feels like a meme at this point, with fans most recently losing their collective gourd over a tongue-in-cheek 'loading screen tip' at a recent showcase.
But there's good news—Silksong's coming in 7,974 years!
Not actually (we pray), but that's what you'll see if you go to the Microsoft Store at the time of writing. Listed at the bottom is an optimistic "release date" for December 30, 9998. That's just under 3 million (2,910,745) days away—or just shy of 4.2 billion minutes. Obviously, this is erroneous—likely a placeholder. Or is it?
Thanks to some sleuthing from my fellow PC Gamer writer Joshua Wolens, we actually found Twitter posts showing screenshots of a similar date on the Xbox store dating back a month to the day of the fool, April 1. A time for jests, japes, and apparently fake release dates.
Likewise on the game's subreddit, a user spotted the 9998 release date April 4, but gathered only 54 upvotes. That's enough for a pretty banging house party, but small pennies on the internet. Contrast that to a more recent thread with over 1,400 upvotes, and it sure is looking like this was an April Fools' joke absolutely nobody clocked until now.
Silksong was announced back in 2019—and in five years we've heard basically diddly squat about it, aside from a promise that Team Cherry had "planned to release in the first half of 2023". As you may have noticed, it's currently the first half of 2024.
The implications, of course, are concerning. If Silksong did release in 9998, we'd only be around 0.06% of the way done with our waiting, but this comparatively small amount of time appears to have broken the larger community so thoroughly that it took the entire month for anybody to notice. Even a peek at the Wayback Machine only saw someone saving the page yesterday.
In the interest of preserving everyone's psyche, though, let me offer some alternative explanations:
- Xbox has a different display page to its web browser cousin, and the latter only cropped up recently.
- This is a placeholder that sits at the maximum release date Microsoft can possibly announce on its systems, just to be safe.
- Time is an illusion, and all things will one day crumble to ash.
Either way, this whole debacle is very funny. Just to clear things up—no, Silksong won't be coming out in 7,974 years. Just for technical reasons, more than anything: videogames have existed for less than a century, and we've already gone from pong to 4K ray-traced graphics. By 9998 we'll have probably all wiped each other out in the Nuclear Console Wars of 2421, or games will be full-immersion VR experiences. Meta still probably won't be responsible for any of it, though.