Over the few hours that remain before my plane heads back to Zurich, our conversation becomes less of a studio tour or interview and more casual. Inga shows me pictures of the Quarter Horse she just bought, a young dunalino mare that she intends to train for Reining shows. She sold her previous horse, his training complete, in order to look for a new challenge.

We both vent our frustration about the state of horse games in general. Inga firmly agrees with my belief that the audience of adult equestrian gamers is critically underserved. I tell her about some of the bad horse games I’ve seen and played and we wonder at some of the odd choices together, both of us well aware how easy some of the mistakes might have been to rectify if only one had asked an equestrian for feedback.

We look back at horse games we’ve played in the past and at the holy trinity of horse games that kickstarted the genre in the German-speaking market: the horse-themed adventure game with a story (Abenteuer auf dem Reiterhof/The Legacy of Rosemond Hill), the pseudo-realistic sports simulation (Riding Star/Mary King’s Riding Star) and the farm build-up tycoon game (Mein Pferdehof/My Horse Farm).

These three were among the earliest entries in the genre and surely in great part responsible for the boom that followed by selling better than anyone had anticipated. They were far from perfect, but even so they had a certain bit of depth that subsequent releases did not usually reach anymore.

In the later 00s, the German horse game market was flooded with low quality knock offs and sequels until finally “horse girls” were not seen as an easily profitable audience anymore and almost a decade would pass until new horse games received funding.

Inga and I both firmly believe that each of these subgenres — riding sports simulation, horse adventure and farm management tycoon — are more than ripe to be explored once more. Perhaps this time by someone with more of an interest in the subject matter.