Indie Company: Team Cherry

Studio Name: Team Cherry 

·         Introduction to Team Cherry

Team Cherry is a small indie studio that is in Adelaide, South Australia. Currently they only have one officially released game called Hollow Knight ever since the studio was started. For a game company of this much net worth, Team Cherry has a surprisingly small number of employees. On average having around 3 official employees at a time, while only hiring for contract work for marketing or music. However, Team Cherry has a deeper backstory behind the name of the company and how the main developers got their start.    

·         Why Team Cherry?

The big question, why would I choose Team Cherry over other historical companies like Nintendo, EA, Blizzard? Comparatively, those companies have already gotten well recognized for the work they have done and had thousands of articles written about them. Alternatively, I think it is important to identify the newer upcoming developers.  On top of that, Team Cherry has shown to be generous with the amount of content vs their price point including the 4 free DLC’s; Hidden Dreams, The Grimm Troupe, Lifeblood, and Godmaster. To me this has shown that Team Cherry has clear goal of making a good game, not just to earn money off their sudden burst of popularity. They have also become well liked from giving their community the ability to sell fan created merchandise, compared to other companies being extremely stingy with their property names. Team Cherry has a well-deserved reputation, recognized for community involvement, and their ability to achieve AAA level of game development for only having 3-person studio.

·         How long have they been around?

The original name “Team Cherry” came from a game jam entry in 2013. The game jam idea revolved around the idea of 10 seconds, so the team came up with the idea that there would be a knight that would eat cherries every 10 seconds to stay alive called “Hungry Knight”. Hence, this led to the name of Team Cherry and some of there early concept for their first game. 4 years after the development of Hungry Knight, Team Cherry created there first game Hollow Knight, which was a massive success for the tiny studio. After, they released there free DLC’s, each a few months apart, to expand on the base game. Lastly, in 2019 they announced their development of their second official game, Hollow Knight: Silksong, which is currently still in development.

·         Types of Games

Team Cherry is most well-known for there work in the metroidvania and platformer genres. They have mentioned taking inspiration from games like Bloodborne, Zelda 2, and Faxanadu. Also, worth mentioning, before Hollow Knight they made a few flash games on New Grounds, but I doubt they have plans to return to that.

·         Who are Team Cherry?

Team Cherry is made up of 3 people Ari Gibson, William Pellen, and Jack Vine. Ari is the one of the co-creators of Team Cherry who did most of animation and artwork for the game studio. William is the second co-creator who has years of game design experience out of the who is responsible for most of the game design.  Jack Vine is the newest member responsible for the coding and his extensive knowledge of the Unity Engine before the original coder was David Kazi. Lastly, the music composer who is temporarily hired is Christopher Larkin who so far worked on both of Team Cherries official games, Hollow Knight and Silksong. 

·         Employment Opportunities

Currently Team Cherry does not have any employment opportunities available, nor do they plan to, because they prefer to keep the team small, they say this in the FAQ of their website.  Although, they did mention that if they planned on hiring people, they would announce through social media. I would not be surprised if they end up expanding, or getting bought out by another company, this would most likely lead to new hires.  

·         Future of Team Cherry

It will be interesting to see what Team Cherry has in store for us in the future. It is amazing to see a company of only 3 people get so much recognition, probably the most I have ever seen for a studio of this size. The success of there first game only leaves room for the growth of there company, hopefully more releases of great games. It will be interesting to see what games Hollow Knight inspires the same way the Team Cherry Dev’s have been inspired. 


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