Not included in that budget at the time was an in-house animator, Wolfgang admits. Having played the game, that does not come as a surprise to me. Instead, animations were outsourced to the creators of the horse’s 3D model.

“The project was very ambitious,” Wolfgang says. “The team was relatively small and inexperienced, which was why publisher and developer decided to start developing the PC Version first and only porting it to PlayStation and Switch later on. This was definitely one of the biggest mistakes in the end and resulted in lag and visibility issues for the console versions”.

Wolfgang hints that the demands of horse game enthusiasts are not thought to be particularly high in the eyes of game publishers. The notion that “horse girls” will be happy with just about anything is prevalent.

There are various things that the Aesir team would have liked to do differently if the project guidelines would have allowed for it, Wolfgang tells me. The horse care minigames are one such aspect: they were originally a more complex system rather than the simple implementation they ended up with, he says. Wolfgang has been following The Mane Quest for a while, he tells me. He mostly agrees with my recent analysis of what makes horse care minigames frustrating, his own game’s inclusion in that criticism notwithstanding.

Despite these issues, the first Windstorm game ended up being a big financial success for publisher EuroVideo Medien. Via other German horse game developers, I know that Windstorm’s impressive sales played a big part in games like My Little Riding Champion and the latest My Riding Stables getting funded – albeit with much smaller scopes and budgets.

Even today, the first Windstorm game sells much better than its sequel Windstorm: Ari’s Arrival – not exactly to Aesir’s contentment.