Horse World Online is a free to play browser game about training and breeding horses. (And as we know, it’s far from the only one of its kind!) This month, the game celebrates its 20th anniversary, giving us an excellent opportunity to dive into a bit of living horse game history with its developers, and take a look at what running a profitable browser game can look like in 2024.

Origins

*Larissa and Tom Rintjema, the creators of* Horse World Online

Larissa and Tom Rintjema are a married couple from Ontario, Canada. They’ve also been TMQ community members from day one onwards. Larissa has been a “horse person” all her life, and gives riding lessons to kids nowadays. She needed someone with experience in Flash on her planned horse game project over twenty years ago, which ended up bringing her and Tom together. Larissa started working on the project as far back as 1997 – when making a web-based game was the only real option for a creator without more resources.

“I would go looking for directories with horse things in them in the early internet, back when even search engines were super primitive,” she reminisces of those early days. On vacation, Larissa would bring a pen and paper prototype of her horse game and make her family play it with her.
In the years since its initial launch in 2004, Horse World Online has lived through almost all of internet history and has adapted on the go. For much of HWO’s history, the game was a side project next to Larissa’s day job as an IT Solutions Architect and Tom’s work as a photographer. In October 2023, life circumstances allowed the Rintjemas an opportunity to turn the game into their full time jobs – a chance to try and eventually finish the game they’ve invested two decades of their life into. Larissa focuses her efforts on programming and detailed horse research, while Tom is in charge of community management and general game development knowledge. Both of them contribute to art and game design.

*Horse World Online through the ages: Originally, the intention was to keep the art very simple so players could upload their own drawings. This has however led to copyright issues in the past.*

*The original HWO home page back in 2004.*

Shifting Technologies

From Larissa’s paper prototype and a pre-search engine internet, over Perl, PHP, Flash and Shockwave, Horse World Online has lived through a wide range of web dev tools, experimenting with some and letting others pass by. “Older versions of our game used Flash,” Tom recalls. “We even experimented with using 3D models for our horses as early as 2008, but browsers couldn’t handle that at the time.” A later 3D performance test from 2015 and various other such experiments can be found on Tom’s YouTube Channel.

Although static image based browser game may look like “old internet”, Tom reveals that a lot of maintenance work goes into ensuring that everything stays functional as technologies evolve and get deprecated. If players don’t notice these changes, things are working as intended. “It’s almost discouraging to make so many updates that nobody even sees,” Tom adds wryly. Larissa explains that giving players a bit more insight into that process and into where the dev time actually goes was one of the reasons for them to launch a Patreon where they give weekly updates.

Nowadays, Horse World Online uses 3D meshes of horses as a basis, renders them into a texture map on a separate server. The 2D mesh then gets created on the client side with a custom 2D mesh viewer in JavaScript. The resulting 2D image gets regenerated on various occasions, which allows the HWO horses to feature bits of realism like that horses with the Grey gene actually grey out over time and develop fleabites, or gain visible weight from overfeeding. “Also fitness increases muscle mass and ‘coat shine’,” Larissa adds, “and pregnant mares’ bellies will grow throughout foal gestation too. Oh and foals will grow from their baby body to their adult body and all the awkward ‘bum high’ stages in between too.”

Video: A look behind the scenes at the horse mesh editor

Browser Games Today

To many game development professionals nowadays – and perhaps even to players not already part of the niche – static browser-based games will seem like a relic of forgotten times. In 2024, when every major game engine can export to HTML5 with a few clicks, when most people carry around a smartphone with more processing power than several generations of game console ever had, why would anyone still be making browser games? And more importantly: why do people keep actually playing browser games?

“We stick with the browser because it works well for us,” Tom explains, “not out of loyalty to the platform.”

The couple explains that they’ve experimented with various engines for game jams and side projects. For HWO though, they appreciate building on what they have and being able to iterate very quickly.

On the players’ side, Larissa and Tom say that they see growth in their niche, rather than a decline.

“When phones and apps first first became a thing, you did see less and less people playing browser games,” Larissa says. “But with responsive design, you can make browser games feel almost like native apps on the phone – so there’s been something of a shift back. We see more acceptance of browser-based applications today.”

Horse World Online is on an upward trajectory in its player numbers and income, but its creators can’t be sure how much of that is a general trend and how much is the direct impact of the increased work they’re putting into it since working on the project full time. The Covid pandemic also played its part in driving up player numbers, as it has done for many online games. HWO is far from the only game of its kind: Between Equine Passion, Morning Dust Ranch, Horse Fable, Horse Reality, Horse Eden Eventing, Hunt and Jump, Flying For Home, Wild Horses Valley, Ropin Ranch, Ubisoft’s Howrse and the recently internationally launched My Horsez, browser-based horse game fans have quite the lineup to chose from in this niche within a niche.

*Some of HWO’s competitors (left to right):* Morning Dust Ranch, Horse Eden Eventing, Equine Passion, Horse Reality

“If you have competition that means there’s a healthy environment there,” Larissa tells me. She sees her competitors’ successes as proof that there is a market for this kind of product. The HWO team keeps an eye on what is out there and listens to what their players like and dislike about other games in the niche, from their monetization methods to their gameplay depth.

That the thriving little niche doesn’t get more attention in the mainstream suits the Rintjemas just fine: “It’s nice to be just unnoticeable enough that big companies don’t really come into this space,” Larissa grins.

Long Term Philosophy

Horse World Online isn’t a huge breakthrough sensation, but I find it an interesting case study of what success can look like in our niche.

For much of its lifetime, the game practically didn’t advertise itself. “I wanted it to be perfect, I wanted to finish it,” Larissa explains sheepishly. “That’s a bit of a naive way to look at it of course, because these types of game are never finished, or perfect.” Only in the past year has the team started marketing a bit more actively.

Part of that process is increasing the game’s visual appeal by updating the artwork for the horses themselves. “Horse World has very advanced genetics that are reflected in the images of the horses” Tom tells me, while at the same time acknowledging that the art quality of their game can’t quite compete today.

Where much of the browser game competition relies on some elements of real time passage, HWO avoids those for the most part and lets players control the game in a turn-based logic.

“The biggest strength of HWO is that you can play daily, then leave for months and come back and everything is still the same,” Tom says. “You’re not losing anything by taking breaks, we’re not engaging in that fear of missing out.”

This design philosophy means that HWO is well suited to players who have other adult responsibilities, which in turn is reflected in its player demographics. While there are children who play, the biggest demographic group is adult women: ages 20-24 make for the biggest portion. (Not so different from TMQ’s own reader demographics) That players can leave and return as they like has lead to people who signed up as teenagers coming back years later and being overjoyed to pick up their game as they left it.

*Equilino, my own favorite childhood browser game, released around 2006*

I find a sincere beauty in that, as someone who at some point as a teenager thought she had grown out of horse games, only return to them with a vengeance as an adult. My own favorite browser horse game at the time was Equilino by Limbic Entertainment, which went offline a few short years after its launch. When I imagine how stoked I would have been to find my account still around nowadays, I’m thrilled to know that Horse World Online can be that nostalgic safe haven for some of its players.

Tom emphasizes that HWO consciously avoids predatory monetization tactics. The game mostly finances itself through in app purchases in addition to a bit of income through Patreon, but the creators ensure that players can access all content for free, without pay-to-win aspects. “We know we’re limiting ourselves in this way,” Larissa admits, “but we don’t need to be the next big thing, we just wanna keep doing this! We’re banking on the game itself being what draws players back.”

They report that the project has been covering its own expenses for about a decade now.

I probably don’t need to explain why most game studios (and especially publishers and investors) wouldn’t be content with that approach. For most businesses under capitalism, steady income alone isn’t considered enough. But it’s still always nice to hear of dev teams that take a different stance and find a way to earn a living without compromising on their ethics.

The good vibes extend to the player community: Tom says he fosters an inclusive, respectful and healthy environment within HWO. As a community manager, but also as a member of other communities such as the TMQ Discord, Tom dedicates a lot of time to helping others out and believes in sharing knowledge about his approach to game making. “If the quality of every horse game is high, people in general will flock to our genre.”
Browser-based horse games might not be the part of our niche that most fascinates me personally as a player, but I love to see someone with an approach like the HWO team thrive. If you yourself are looking for a turn-based, free to play, low pressure game with some depth and complexity in horse breeding, I can only recommend taking a look at Horse World Online and reporting back to the TMQ Community.

Horse World Online Celebrates its Anniversary and Looks Back on 20 Years of Browser Game History

Origins

Shifting Technologies

Browser Games Today

Long Term Philosophy