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.
I still remember the halcyon days when video game humor was an industry in its own right. There were countless websites about it. Some of them were even funny. And hundreds of good hard-working writers, actors, artists, and animators could count on gainful employment, all because Duke Nukem Forever still hadn’t come out. I mean, what’s the deal with that? I haven’t actually looked at the data to confirm it, but I can confidently say for a fact that every single person who made a joke about Duke Nukem Forever back then became a billionaire afterwards. Then Duke Nukem Forever came out (in case you forgot, which is likely) and the market was ruined. What were all the people whose livelihood depended on that joke supposed to do? Make different jokes? It was hopeless.
We thought The Last Guardian jokes could fill the void, but then that had to come out and ruin everything too. Silksong seemed to be our new savior, and for a lot of us it still feels like it is. The shock takes time to process. Some of us are already turning to The Elder Scrolls VI as the new heir to The Joke, but personally I have my doubts. We’ll be waiting for that one a long time to come, for sure, but it’s a Bethesda game. The well of jokes about it never coming out will eventually run dry, even if the well of jokes about it being a bland buggy mess won’t.
No, in these dark times of video games actually releasing, we need to turn to the old reliable. It’s the cliche pick, true, but if we didn’t like cliches we wouldn’t be making this joke. No matter what happens, we can always sleep soundly knowing that Half-Life 3 will never come out. People have been waiting on the next chapter of Gordon Freeman’s story in one way or another for 18 years now. The wait for this game can legally buy tobacco! Now that’s the kind of not releasing you can hang your hat on.
I’m sure some Doubting Debbies are already prepared to tell me I’m wrong, and that there are all kinds of hints of Half-Life 3’s imminent release just around the corner. After all, we’re talking about Valve here. They may take a long time, but they always come through on their promises in the end. Once they’ve finished doing regular updates for the first Left 4 Dead, item trading for Portal 2, a moonbase map for Team Fortress 2, the Great Confluence event for Dota 2, the million-dollar tournament for Artifact, and the second season of Dota Underlords that they also said they’ll do, they might get started on Half-Life 3 right away.
Well, if by some horrible stroke of fate the worst-case scenario happens and Half-Life 3 some day actually releases, we’ll always not have Beyond Good and Evil 2.
