Silksong, the successor to Team Cherry's Hollow Knight, will eventually be released. Perhaps. Maybe we can hope. When it's done. Quickly™. At this point it feels like a meme because things are so late, fans have recently their collective over the tongue—in-cheek "Loading screen tips" in a recent showcase

But there's good news - Silksong is coming after 7,974 years! 

Not actually (we pray), but that's what you'll see if you go to the Microsoft Store at the time you write. Listed at the bottom is the optimistic "release date" of 9998-12-30. That's just under 300 million (2,910,745) days — or 4.2 billion minutes shy. Obviously, this is incorrect — probably a placeholder. Or is it? 

Thanks to some detectives from my fellow PC gamer writer Joshua Warren, we actually found a Twitter post showing screenshots of similar dates on the xbox Store dating back a month to Fool's Day,April1. Time for Jests, japes, and apparently fake release dates.

Similarly, on the game's subreddit, users found 9998 release dates on 4/4, but only attracted 54 votes in favor. It is quite enough for a banging house party, but a small penny on the Internet. In contrast to a more recent thread with more than 1,400 votes in favor, it looks like this was an April Fool's joke. Silksong was announced in 2019, and you may have heard that Team Cherry is basically squatting about it in 5 years, except for the promise that Team Cherry "was due to release in the first half of 2023," but now it's in the first half of 2024. 

Of course, its meaning is relevant. If Silksong released it in 9998, we only have about 0.06% of the way we wait, but this relatively small amount of time seems to have completely broken the larger community, even peeking at the Wayback Machine, I just saw someone saving the page yesterday.

To preserve the spirit of every person, however, let me offer some alternative explanations:

In any case, this whole fiasco is very funny. No, Silksong will not come out in 7,974 — just to clear things up. For technical reasons, above all: video games have existed for less than a century, and by 9998 we've already gone from Pon to 4K ray tracing graphics, we'll probably have wiped out each other in the 2421 nuclear console war, or the game will be a full immersive VR experience . But Meta is probably not responsible for any of it.