Mina The Hollower Dev Says They’ve ‘Talked A Lot About What Mina 2 Would Be’

Mina the Hollower just launched last week after over four years in development, so it’s perhaps a little too soon to be worrying about things like “DLC” and “sequels.” But  given that developer Yacht Club Games wasn’t able to start Mina until it was done with ten years of free DLC support for its previous title, Shovel Knight, I felt I had to ask them about what was next when I had the chance.

“No free DLC,” programmer David D’Angelo said immediately when I asked him what they learned from Shovel Knight’s Kickstarter and release that they then applied to Mina. “Basically, we’re not promising anything that—Whatever we promise is what we want to do for sure, without question. We came up with a plan for what the game was. And that’s what we put on Kickstarter. And that’s what we delivered at the end of the day. So, yeah, it was just like, no empty…or I don’t know what you even call that, like a promise that you’re not really sure what it is.”

D’Angelo is referring to the many, many stretch goals achieved by the original Shovel Knight Kickstarter campaign that then turned into ten years of work on essentially free content for the studio. Initially, those goals were just listed vaguely as stuff like, “Playable Boss Knight” and “4 Player Battle Mode.” Over time, these evolved into three entirely new campaigns for three of the original game’s enemies, plus several re-releases with new features, and a number of other free updates with things like a body swap mode, a challenge mode, and more. Yacht Club was still releasing new Shovel Knight content as recently as 2024, with 20 playable characters, online multiplayer, rewind, save states, and other new features. That’s nuts for a game that was once just sort of a bouncy, single-player Mega Man-type thing.

Not so for Mina. D’Angelo isn’t taking DLC off the table entirely, and does clarify that the team has some quality-of-life updates planned as well as a randomizer mode. “But like, we’ve literally never talked about [major DLC] or thought about it. And like, the game is huge and big. I don’t even know, we’d have to really figure out even how to add something to it.”

However, D’Angelo does say that Yacht Club is keen on spending more time with Mina. So while he’s not announcing anything at the moment, yes, the team has talked about a potential sequel. A lot.

“We’ve got pretty clear ideas, and we’ve put hints in Mina about where it could go a little bit. No one’s going to pick those up. But if we did make Mina 2, it’d be like, ‘Oh, they put that in there on purpose, right?’ But, yeah. In a couple weeks, we’ll find out how everyone’s feeling about everything, but my guess is everyone will want to take a break from Mina. But that said, we think of Mina like Shovel Knight. It’s a tentpole game of our studio that we [want to] keep going.”

Mina the Hollower has already sold 300,000 copies in three days according to Bloomberg, and is thus far the best-reviewed game of the year (I certainly loved it). Its co-founders are hoping to see that number climb significantly higher, and D’Angelo says sales of Mina will play a major role in what the studio does next. “If we sell a couple hundred thousand, we’re good to make a certain kind of game. And if we sell millions of copies, we’re good to make a different kind of game. Or be a certain size of a studio or what have you. We’re hoping it’s a Shovel Knight-style game in the end [Shovel Knight had sold 2.65 million copies as of September 2019]. That’s what has kept us going. But that said, even if it sold half as many units as Shovel Knight, maybe Mina makes Shovel Knight sell more units.”

Sales figures obviously matter for every studio, but it’s especially critical for Yacht Club, which has determinedly embraced its own independence from the beginning and refused to take funding from major publishers. That’s one of the reasons why Yacht Club went to Kickstarter to begin with, and that’s why it returned to Kickstarter for Mina. “When you take other people’s money, it comes with baggage, right?” says D’Angelo. “So unless someone is like, ‘We’re going to give you money and there’s no strings attached,’ right? Then we’re like, ‘Oh, we’re getting interested.'”