My fellow fans of quality video game satire, I have devastating news. Hell hath frozen over. Hollow Knight: Silksong is releasing on September 4, putting a definitive end to jokes about Silksong never coming out. I repeat: one of our most enduring running jokes is dead. May all our clown gifs rest in power.
Video game comedy (and maybe the regular, non-video game kind, I wouldn’t know) is hard. It takes a lot of work to craft an observation that’s equal parts funny, insightful, unexpected, and about video games. But no matter how much this crazy world around us changes, anyone wanting to make jokes about video games on the Internet could always rely on two eternal truths: It would be funny if the mushrooms Mario ate were really drugs, and there’s one game that’s just taking forever to come out, man. In 1998, the second Penny Arcade strip ever was about how Daikatana hadn’t released yet, and the world of dumb jokes about video games hasn’t been the same ever since.
Most of the histeria comes from the first year of development being fairly open with news and trailers and music and even a live playable demo, which was then followed by about six years of almost total radio silence. Since the first game took only half that time to develop, and there weren't any indicators of progress, people started to fear the game was stuck in dev purgatory. Not to mention there were a couple false release dates dropped*, and other setbacks like covid and the Unity ceo's bullshit. Eventually it turned into a meme among the fans.
*the biggest being in 2023(iirc?) when Silksong was featured in a Gamepass preview of "coming by the end of the year" games
I suppose this is a benefit of avoiding all marketing that I possibly can - I don't see the things that get people all riled up and frustrated/disappointed.