“It’s Make-Or-Break For Sure” – Shovel Knight Dev’s Fate Rests On Upcoming Zelda-Like

We have been keeping an eye on Mina the Hollower for some years now. This is the GBC-looking Zelda-like from Yacht Club Games, the studio behind Shovel Knight, that launched on Kickstarter back in 2022, and only recently missed out on its initial release date thanks to a last-minute delay. It feels like it has been a long time coming, a fact that Yacht Club is reportedly painfully aware of.

In a new report from Bloomberg (paywalled), studio founder Sean Velasco described Mina as “make-or-break” for the future of Yacht Club Games. In the time since Shovel Knight, the studio has downsized, faced a global pandemic and divided its teams into two — later reforged into one — and delays don’t come cheap, either. “If we sold 500,000 copies, then we would be golden,” Velasco told Bloomberg, “If we sold even 200,000, that would be really, really great. If we sold, like, 100,000, that’s not so good”.

According to the report, the game’s inception came back in 2019 by designer Alec Faulkner. Yacht Club initially split its staff into two teams — one focusing on Mina, and the other on a 3D Shovel Knight follow-up — though the former project quickly grew in ambition, with Faulkner reportedly struggling to operate as the game’s director.

Seeing that the system wasn’t working, the studio laid off some staff to cut expenses and re-combined the teams to focus purely on the Mina project, with Velasco stepping into the director role. According to artist Sandy Gordon, had the team stuck together right from the jump, “we would’ve finished it two to three years ago”.

“If Mina flops, we’ll still be around,” Velasco told Bloomberg, though he’s quick to clarify that they would “need more money”. The studio is already taking steps to cut back on this front, moving fully remote at the end of the year and shifting its attention to only working on one project at a time.

From the little of Mina that we have seen so far, we remain cautiously optimistic that the full game will deliver the goods. There’s a free demo now available on the eShop (sporting 120fps on Switch 2, no less), and it plays every bit as much like a 2D Zelda game as you would hope. A delay is never a welcome sight, but our fingers are crossed that we don’t have to wait too long to see things hit their full potential.