Horseland

» see horseland.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Horseland began in 1994 as a webpage about horses, which in 1994 was an entirely normal thing for a website to be. The game came four years later. You bought a horse, bred it, trained it, entered it in shows against horses belonging to strangers, and all of it happened in a browser window. Dogs were added later, then a 2008 redesign that gave the site a 2D walkable world, 3D jumping competitions and a currency called Coins.

The members were overwhelmingly girls between roughly ten and twenty two, and by the end there were more than eight million registered accounts spread across most of the countries that had broadband. In September 2006 the site got an animated cartoon out of it, produced with DIC Entertainment, which is a strange thing to say about a browser game that started as somebody's fan page. A junior version for younger players opened on 1 September 2006 and closed in February 2009.

What killed it was the same thing that killed most of that generation: browsers stopped running Flash, and Horseland was Flash all the way down. The announcement came sometime in late 2018, giving a permanent closure date of 1 January 2019. The servers stayed reachable a few months past that and went offline in April.

By 1998 I had a 33.6k modem and an interest in what the modem could reach, which did not extend to showing virtual horses against American teenagers. This one was not for me by age or by country, and it never needed to be. Eight million people is a very large number for a product nobody I knew ever mentioned.

~ the record ~

~ the economy of it ~

The 2008 redesign is the moment Horseland became a business rather than a hobby. Coins bought tack, bought better stabling, bought the things that made your horse competitive against people who were also buying them. It is the standard shape of a free-to-play kids game and Horseland arrived at it a decade into its own life, which is late enough to suggest the site was being run by people who liked horses first and ran a business second.

The trademark outlived the game. That single page still on horseland.com lists an email address for licensing inquiries next to a line about the properties being available, which is what a company does when the software is gone but the name might still be worth something to a toy maker.

~ what got buried with it ~

Twenty one years of bloodlines. Horseland members bred horses across generations, tracked lineage, and traded animals that had pedigrees other players recognized. None of that survives a server switch-off, because the value was entirely in the database and the database was never published.

The closure notice went up in April 2019, and the image file serving that page was saved out of GIMP on 16 April 2019, which is as close as anyone will get to the exact afternoon somebody sat down and turned a twenty one year old website into a goodbye.

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