In the middle of the 2000’s, the horse game genre was blooming and booming. Where American and British horse gamers had the Barbie Horse Adventure games and the Gallop Racer series, the German-speaking horse game market was dominated by frequent releases of locally developed games.

The genre of “PC Edutainment Games for Kids” saw horse game releases aplenty for a few years, as a quick glance at the list of top sellers in the genre from 2005 shows.

I remember buying one game called Riding Star on a whim, several years after it was actually released, in the faint hope that it would be anywhere near as good as my ever beloved Mein Pferdehof.

I don’t remember all that much of the gameplay, but I do recall that I got bored of it within perhaps two or three hours of playing. What I did not think about at the time were the circumstances under which a game like Riding Star was being made, or why I grew bored with it so quickly.

When I started studying Game Design a few years later, I learned about the difference between making a game because you want to make it, and making a game because you can get paid to make it. Looking back, it wasn’t hard to guess that Riding Star was not a passion project.

As such, it came as no big surprise that upon asking him what it was like to work on Riding Star 2, my twitter acquaintance Jörg Reisig replied:

“At the time, I really hated it.”

The Game