Hollow Knight: Silksong fans can breathe easy this week knowing that the follow-up to one of the best Metroidvanias of all time is coming out soon. But why, exactly, did it take so long in the first place? The duo behind Team Cherry broke their silence this week, and it turns out that there was never some big, dramatic reason that the game didn’t get finished earlier. After selling 15 million copies of Hollow Knight, Team Cherry wanted to get things right for Silksong — so it took its sweet time ensuring that would be the case.

In a report by Jason Schreier at Bloomberg, Team Cherry pulls back the curtain on the creation of its much-anticipated indie game, and while there are no enormous reveals, it’s still fascinating to hear the Aussies speak so frankly about a game that’s otherwise been shrouded in mystery.

As fans are painfully aware, Silksong originally began as a planned piece of DLC for Hollow Knight, but midway through development the plan changed to expand it into a stand-alone release. This was the start of an entire saga that’s spawned countless memes and inpatient fans, some of whom turned the wait for Silksong into their online identity. You couldn’t have any type of gaming event or livestream without someone crossing their fingers that Silksong would make an appearance. And the longer the game went MIA, the more fervently fans believed next time would totally pay off.

Turns out, Team Cherry was just having a good time making the game. Maybe too good of a time: At one point, the creative team realized it simply had to stop ideating and expanding the scope of the game. Otherwise, the game would never ship.

“I remember at some point I just had to stop sketching,” says Team Cherry co-founder Ari Gibson, referencing his work crafting concept art for the game. “Because I went, ‘Everything I’m drawing here has to end up in the game. That’s a cool idea, that’s in. That’s a cool idea, that’s in.’ You realize, ‘If I don’t stop drawing, this is going to take 15 years to finish.'”

Ironically, the longer Silksong took to make, the longer Team Cherry wanted to keep working on it. After all, expectations for the game just kept rising. The team wanted to make sure that Silksong could meet the massive expectations fans had for it. Based on what Team Cherry has shared thus far, the sequel certainly sounds more ambitious than Hollow Knight. Silksong sounds massive: There are multiple towns, and each one has its own set of quests. Hollow Knight, on the other hand, had a single hub.

Another factor that probably contributed to the game’s lengthy development time was money. Hollow Knight had a similarly extended development circuit, and in some ways it sounded like reason that game only really came out because Team Cherry was otherwise going to run out of money. For Silksong, the team had already sold millions of copies of Hollow Knight. Crucially, the bulk of those 15 million sales happened during the extended wait for Silksong. It seems like the more people hyped Silksong up, the more other bystanders would wonder what, exactly, the fuss was about. In a way, the culture of waiting developed around Silksong was the best possible thing that could’ve happened to the game, marketing-wise. Big-budget games spend a small fortune trying to amass a fraction of the attention that Silksong garnered by doing absolutely nothing, at least publicly.

Now that we know why it took so long, the next logical question is this: Can Silksong possibly live up to all that hype? Guess we’ll know pretty soon. Here’s the kicker, though. The release of Silksong is merely the beginning of a different countdown. Though Team Cherry shared no specifics, it did mention that it’s already thinking about what it can add to the game once it’s out. The developers already calling their plans “ambitious” and they hope they can find a way to bring their ideas to life. What are the chances we’ll see history repeat itself? Maybe years from now we’ll look back on this as the start of the ordeal for Hollow Knight 3.