Team Cherry Lore and Plot Explained Script

William Pellen and Ari Gibson. If you’re a regular to my channel, the names probably sound familiar. These are the two men responsible for the creation of Hollow Knight. But how well do you really know the members of Team Cherry? What skeletons take up residence in their closets? It’s time to stop pretending that Team Cherry is harmless. As a knight of great renown once said “Nothing is harmless”

There are many places we could start with the story of Team Cherry. Like 412 million years ago, when bugs first walked the earth. Or even 1901, when Australia gained independence from Great Britain. Or maybe 1945, when Great Britain gained independence from Australian exports. Instead, we are going to start here. This is Return to Booty Grotto. It was posted to Newgrounds on October 12, 2012 by a man named William Pellen, making this his first game ever published on the internet. Return to Booty Grotto revolves around Finn the fish, a goldfish with a bowler hat who was given a treasure map by his grandpa. The game itself isn’t terrible. You basically navigate through Booty Grotto, collecting fish and avoiding enemies and traps. Unfortunately, Finn is the most pathetic protagonist ever to be featured in a game on account of the fact that bumping into the wall kills him instantly. The lore explanation for this is that Finn just ate. Seems legit.

Now you might be wondering if this game has any similarities to Hollow Knight? Well yes, actually. First off, the game has a bestiary, filled with deep and rich lore about each of the characters. On top of that the game also features jellyfish, as well as… bees? And then there’s.... Oh god!

            ♫Hello Darkness my old friend.♫

Return to Booty Grotto also has multiple endings, much like Hollow Knight. In one ending, Finn rescues this random fish named Gillie that was locked inside a treasure chest by a giant anglerfish. In another ending he becomes a king because he found some random orbs in a temple. And in the last ending he goes to outer space, reaches the end of the universe, experiences a cosmic event, reawakens in the ocean. opens an ancient chest, finds a piece of bubble gum, blows a bubble big enough to encase his body and then flies off into space never to be seen again. I’m pretty sure this is the canonical ending.

Anyway, Return to Booty Grotto was actually a sequel to Booty Grotto, a game made by another one of William’s friends, some guy named Brad. At the time, William was making video games as a hobby while working as a web designer. William had been in love with video games ever since his dad showed him how to find the boots in Zelda II, the Adventure of Link. Because despite popular belief, Zelda II isn’t actually terrible.

On May 12, 2013, William posted a demo for his new game Lulanda on Stencyl.com. Stencyl is a program that allows users to develop small flash and mobile games without having to have an insane knowledge of code. Lulanda is 2D platformer that takes inspiration from Super Mario World, Alex Kidd and Zelda II. The game revolves around a little deer girl thing trying to collect some other things for some reason. The first level takes place in Onion Valley where everyone is made of onions. And of course, there are buzzsaws. I’m starting to think that William has an unhealthy obsession with these things. There’s also a shop in the game that features a plush toy of Finn along with other random characters. Are these from other games William had ideas for? I for one would love to be able to play as a floppy eared dog, or an… angry booger.

William put a lot of time into Lulanda, posting another demo to Newgrounds in October. At this point, William was experiencing issues with Stencyl being unable to handle the size of his game. Lulanda would need to be developed in a different engine if William wanted to keep working on it.

But enough about William Pellen. We all know why we’re here. You want to know about Ari Gibson and his beautiful sweater. Before Hollow Knight, Ari was working in animation. While both William and Ari had experience in animation, Ari had worked on several animation projects by this point. Ari worked for the People’s Republic of Animation, working on animation for a wide variety of mediums, from TV specials and short films to commercials and even video games. Remember that breathtaking ending cutscene in the 2008 Nintendo Wii game, “de Blob”? Well, that animation was produced by the People’s Republic of Animation, and directed by Ari Gibson himself. Ari also worked on such amazing titles as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Megamind: Mega Team Unite.

In 2012, Ari founded Mechanical Apple with Jason Pamment. Together, the two worked on a number of animation projects including music videos for the Audrey’s and Gotyee… Go tye… oh jesus. “Goh-tee-yay”. There is a playlist in the description below of all of the animation projects Ari has worked on that I could find, so go check that out. Ari’s love for video games began with Faxanadu, which plays very similarly to Zelda II, but it isn’t a Zelda game so no one has heard of it.

William and Ari eventually started talking about the idea of working on games together. The two had met through friends several years ago, but it wasn’t until midway through 2013 that they began making games together. William sent Ari a copy of Lulanda, and the two decided to start participating in game jams. Rohan Fraser, a friend that Ari had met through work, also joined in on the fun. These were the three original members of Team Cherry, and in August, they entered their very first game jam, Ludum Dare 27.

Ludum Dare is a game jam event that occurs multiple times a year. In a game jam, participants are given a short amount of time to put together a game from scratch. It’s basically a way for developers to flex their creativity and practice working together under stress. Ludum Dare 27 began on August 23, 2013 and gave teams 72 hours to make a game based on the theme of “10 Seconds”. Over the course of three days, William, Ari and Rohan created a game called Hungry Knight. In Hungry Knight, the player plays as this... thing, and is tasked with killing three masked… bears in order to revive the player character’s friend. However, if the knight doesn’t eat a cherry every ten seconds, they die. Also, their friend is revived as a skeleton? That doesn’t make sense.

Hungry Knight was the inception for a lot of what Team Cherry has become. The name Team Cherry actually comes from the cherries found in this game. And obviously they reused the design of the hungry knight in this game for Dung Defender in Hollow Knight. Hollow Knight also borrowed the idea of killing three masked beings from Hungry Knight as well. So it’s basically the same game, guys.

Less than a month after creating Hungry Knight, Team Cherry participated in another game jam, Indie Speedrun 2013. While they missed the deadline for the game jam, Team Cherry still put together a game, Tomb Cat. Tomb Cat is about a mother of three kittens that makes money by grave robbing Egyptian temples. There are three separate temples with varying numbers of rooms. The goal is to collect as much money as you can without running out of time in any room or dying. This would be Team Cherry’s last game before development on Hollow Knight finally began.

During this time, Ari continued to work on animation for Mechanical Apple. In March of 2014, Mechanical Apple released “Motorbike”, a short film about a kid who is trying to make it to a date on time. What’s interesting about this film is that the music was done by none other than Christopher Larkin. Chris and Ari had worked on a few projects together, but Chris would later go on to produce the beautiful score found in Hollow Knight. Another cool thing about this film is that it was actually selected as a Disney Favorite and was featured on Disney’s YouTube channel. So there’s a nice bit of riveting Hollow Knight trivia for you to share at your next social gathering.

Ari also continued to hold a fascination towards the character from Hungry Knight. Ari even drew concept art featuring the Hungry Bug as it was called at this point. Ari named the 1985 OVA “Angel’s Egg” as one of his main inspirations for the art in Hollow Knight, and you can definitely see the connection. The dark colors, the faded cities, shells in the walls. This also means that Ari is canonically a weeb.

Hollow Knight finally began to take shape in April 2014. It was Ludum Dare 29, and the theme was “Beneath the Surface”. Team Cherry came up with the idea of a ruined bug kingdom, where players would start in town, and then head down a well into the darkness below. This is the first piece of art made for Hollow Knight. Using bugs for characters made it easier to draw and animate them quickly. Dark colors also helped to obscure rushed artwork. In other words, many inspirations for Hollow Knight were born out of convenience. Team Cherry didn’t submit anything for Ludum Dare 29, but they held onto this game, deciding it was time to take the next step.

Team Cherry ripped the Knight sprites from Hungry Knight and gutted the code from Lulanda to begin development on Hungry Knight 2. Of course, this name didn’t stick around for long. Team Cherry decided to change it after realizing that the Knight doesn’t really eat anything anymore. They decided on Hollow Knight because… well, the Knight looked Hollow, I guess. During the original game jam, Team Cherry came up with the idea that some of the rooms world shift positions, sort of like a roguelike. This would change the order in which players would collect upgrades and items. Team Cherry gave it up because it was confusing and really screwed up any kind of narrative they tried to make. And trust me, the narrative is already confusing enough without the world changing shape every playthrough.

For about 5 or 6 months before the Kickstarter in November 2014, William and Ari worked on their new game. At some point during all of this, Rohan Fraser made his exit from Team Cherry. From what I can tell, Ari and William had both quit their jobs and dedicated most of their time to working on Hollow Knight. Rohan might not have been willing to take that plunge, and who could blame him? I assume living in Australia is scary enough without being unemployed too. Like I said earlier, Rohan worked with Ari in animation, and he has been working on his own comic series called Blokkan.

November 18th, 2014 was the day Hollow Knight finally landed on Kickstarter. What’s interesting is that Team Cherry never consciously labeled their game as a metroidvania. Regardless, Hollow Knight does draw a lot of inspiration from the genre. Team Cherry openly admits that Metroid and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrows inspired them when creating Hollow Knight. But they also list other games as well, such as Zelda II and Faxanadu. They also cite Mega Man X as an inspiration for the movement and controls. The charm system was based on the badge system from Paper Mario. They also cited Pikmin at some point, but I don’t really know how or why?

And yes, there is a bit of Dark Souls in there as well. They have implied that the corpse run mechanic is at least somewhat inspired by Dark Souls. While Dark Souls isn’t the first game to do this, it definitely brought the mechanic into the mainstream. It terms of story and lore, Team Cherry has never said anything about being inspired by Dark Souls, which is suspicious. I mean, the White Lady is one giant pair of tits away from basically being Gwynevere, but whatever. Team Cherry also said that the soul mechanic in Hollow Knight took inspiration from the rally mechanic in Bloodborne. After taking a hit in Bloodborne, the player has the opportunity to regain their lost health by dealing damage to an enemy. But after a short period of time, this opportunity vanishes. So yeah, when it comes to inspiration for Hollow Knight, I think William said it best.

“We’ve stolen a lot of ideas.”

“Hey, well that’s the way to do it.”

The Kickstarter goal for Hollow Knight was 35,000 dollars Australian. Pledge rewards included stuff like signed artwork, dream characters, dream warriors, NPCs, bosses, dungeons and there was even a slot for a backer village. Some of this content is still waiting to be added in the Hornet DLC. Hollow Knight didn’t get officially funded until December 15th, just three days before the kickstarter ended. There was a huge ramp up right at the end closing out the final funding figure at over 57,000 dollarydoos. After the dust settled and late PayPal payments were added up, 5 Kickstarter stretch goals had been reached, including a Wii U port and an additional playable character.

With their new piles of cash, Team Cherry got themselves a nice little office in downtown Adelaide. It was time to get serious about developing Hollow Knight into a fully fledged game. That meant ditching Stencyl once and for all. If Hollow Knight was going to be ported to Wii U, the game was going to need to be built in a new engine. Team Cherry decided on Unity, bringing in Dave Kazi to help them out. Dave was an experienced programmer and knew his way around Unity. And when comparing the game in both engines, it’s pretty obvious that they made the right choice. Around March 2015, Team Cherry commissioned Christopher Larkin to compose the soundtrack for Hollow Knight. Everything was coming together, but there was a lot of work left to do.

The original plan was to release Hollow Knight in June 2015. The game was originally intended to only be two to three hours long. Needless to say, the game ended up being a tad bigger than that. It wasn’t that Team Cherry had to redo the whole game or scrap a whole bunch of stuff or anything like that. The base idea was that there would be three guardians that the player would have to defeat in order to fight the final boss. And we can see this design in the final game, but Team Cherry just kept adding more and more. 

There were originally going to be only three areas that branched of the Forgotten Crossroads, the Fungal Wastes, the Ruined City and the Bone Forest. They wanted to add another section to the Forgotten Crossroads, so we got the Crystal Peaks. The Fungal Wastes was broken into several different areas such as Greenpath, the Fog Canyon and the Queen’s Gardens. The Bone Forest was moved down to the bottom of the map, so Team Cherry created Deepnest to connect it better to the world. Unfortunately, the Forest of Bones was cut, but it was replaced with the Ancient Basin. The Blue Lake was added at some point so that the rain in the City of Tears actually made sense. Kingdom’s Edge was added to contain the Hive and other loose ends that were left over. By the end, the map was huge, with a huge variety of locations and enemies.

The entire map of Hollow Knight is comprised of black squares that are dressed up with 2D hand-drawn artwork. The art and animation was done almost exclusively in Photoshop. Ideas for enemies usually began on a whiteboard or on paper, and it didn’t take long to bring those drawings to life. A boss could be conceived and animated in about a week, and a regular enemy could be animated in as fast as 40 minutes and programmed in another 40 minutes. Unity allowed Team Cherry to layer the artwork to make it look more dynamic as well. William used PlayMaker as a way to program the AI for the enemies in the game. Apparently, this came with some headaches as variables would randomly switch on enemies. According to Ari, this happened constantly throughout the game’s development. This image shows the programming for the Hollow Knight boss battle, showing how complicated these things can get.

I think most everyone can agree that the music in Hollow Knight is absolutely amazing, but it took a lot of work from both Chris Larkin and Team Cherry to make this happen. The majority of the music was based around the viola and the piano, and Larkin implemented leitmotifs into the game by using certain melodies in multiple parts of the game to strengthen narrative connections. The soundtrack was refined over the course of Hollow Knight’s two year development, giving Team Cherry plenty of time to work with Larkin to make sure that each area of the game had the perfect music to match. 

Most of the voices were done by William, Ari and Makoto Koji. Makoto Koji shares an office with Team Cherry where she runs her own art and animation studio, Paper Rabbits. And her animation is really good, guys. It may not be as good as my brief foray into animation, but you have to start somewhere, I guess. Makoto did about 90% percent of the female voices in Hollow Knight, including Hornet, the Mantis Lords, Seer and uh… Flukemarm. Many other voices were provided by friends and family. I’ve included a list in the description of all of the known voices that Team Cherry has confirmed.

The lore for Hollow Knight was something that was developed organically. Team Cherry always knew the basic structure of the plot, but they left a lot open so that the lore didn’t dictate the contents of the game. The script was written in a Google spreadsheet by both William and Ari towards the end of development.

With all of the extra work Team Cherry put in to expand the world of Hallownest, the game didn’t actually come out until February 24th, 2017. This was two years after the Kickstarter, and overshot Team Cherry’s planned release date by over 18 months. They ended up taking out a loan to help cover the cost of making the game. After all was said and done, the game took about 90 to 100 thousand dollars to produce, which is an insanely small amount of money to make a game on. I mean, I don’t even get out of bed for $100,000. 

As Hollow Knight’s launch creeped closer, Team Cherry hired Matthew Griffin, or Leth, to handle PR and marketing. Leth’s primary method for marketing Hollow Knight was to send it to streamers, allowing the game to spread through word of mouth. He also worked with Fangamer to release Hollow Knight merch and scheduled interviews with news outlets. So if you’re watching this, Leth, please get in touch with me because I have a few questions for Team Cherry that I would like to ask. 

Hollow Knight was a sleeping success. Unfortunately, the game released right before Horizon Zero Dawn and Breath of the Wild, the two biggest games of the year. So it got a little lost in the shuffle. I didn’t even know about Hollow Knight until I saw it in a video by some obscure YouTuber going by the name “videogamedunkey”.

But as time has gone on, more and more people have realized how amazing this game is. The Hollow Knight subreddit now has almost 40,000 members. When the game released on Switch, it sold a quarter of a million copies in two weeks. The game also passed a million sales on Steam back in July 2018. And it’s really popular in Utah, I guess. That’s when you know you’ve made it. And before long, Hollow Knight will be taught in schools alongside other great classics such as “The Odyssey” and “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace”.

Since the release of Hollow Knight, Team Cherry has seen a few small changes. Dave Kazi left to work at some big company, and Team Cherry picked up Jack Vine to fill his role. There are no actual photos of Jack, and he’s not even on Team Cherry’s about page. I have a theory that he doesn’t actually exist, and that Team Cherry made him up for tax purposes.

Work on Hollow Knight has continued since its initial release. Team Cherry worked with Jump Shark studios to rework the game’s code so that it could run on the Nintendo Switch. The game was also released on Switch at E3 2018, and on PS4 and Xbox One later that September. Team Cherry has also released three content packs, or four if you count Lifeblood as a content pack, which Team Cherry does, but they still haven’t updated it in the game, so I have to say three. Team Cherry is currently working on the Hornet DLC, and then after that, Hollow Knight will finally be complete, and this channel will pivot to the next logical step: Teletubbies lore.

And that’s the story of Team Cherry. I hope this video was enlightening for you. Or maybe even a little inspiring. To think that such an amazing game was put together by just three people. It really is amazing how much indie developers can do nowadays. All that matters is that you have talent, willpower and maybe a little luck. And I’m so glad that Team Cherry met those requirements. Thank you, Team Cherry. Thank you. Now hurry up and release Hornet DLC, you lazy firemen!