Video game history is riddled with foundational Horse Moments, whether we’re talking classics like Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Shadow of the Colossus or (slightly) more off-the-beaten-path fare like Barbie Horse Adventures. But in the recent gaming canon, one game effectively represents an equine epoch: Red Dead Redemption 2. Its horses are so detailed that thousands of players treat it as a massively multiplayer trail ride simulator. Even before the game came out, the internet became enamored with its horse testicles, which developers said expanded and shrank depending on the in-game temperature. Turns out, however, there’s a problem with that last bit. On the latest episode of You Are Error, we discuss Rockstar’s fumbling of that figurative and literal ball and so much more.
The topic of this episode of You Are Error, Aftermath’s new podcast about gaming’s greatest misconceptions, is horses. It’s a pretty far cry from the globally consequential subject matter of episode one, and that’s by design. With these first two episodes, I’m hoping to demonstrate You Are Error’s full potential breadth. It can be serious, it can be silly, it can be something in between.
I decided on horses in particular, though, because while there’s plenty of lighthearted enjoyment to be derived from man’s best friend that isn’t a dog, there’s a deceptive amount of depth and cultural relevance to the topic as a whole. Horses are everywhere – in society and media. We can all at least sort of draw one. How and why do games mess up those, of all things? And what are game makers choosing to focus on instead?
Today’s guest who, yes, unfortunately, I asked about horse testicles, is Alice Ruppert, video game horse consultant and creator of The Mane Quest, a website about video game horses. We discussed the history of horses in games and how, even in this era of photorealism, some companies still fail to stick the landing when it comes to basics like legs. Legs! That’s the main thing about horses.
But alongside major releases, there’s also an entire, oft-overlooked genre of games focused on caring for, nurturing, and riding horses. If you grew up in the era of Barbie Horse Adventures (and all the jokes surrounding it), you might be starting to see the faint outline of a gendered component to this conversation, and well, at this point I’ll just let the conversation speak for itself. Buckle – or perhaps I should say saddle – up for an interview that I enjoyed tremendously, and I hope you will too.
You can listen below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, please consider leaving a review so that this foal of a podcast can eventually become a championship-winning race horse.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Nathan: In the run up to Red Dead Redemption 2’s release, they started talking about the amount of detail they packed into their horses, and the example that they used is that, if you had a horse in different temperatures, depending on if it was hot or cold, the size of their testicles would change. They’d be smaller or larger depending on if it was hot or cold outside.
Alice: It is not the first time I’ve been asked about Red Dead horse balls.
Nathan: I’m not surprised by that! Because I feel like, as we’ve already talked about, in a lot of games, horses are almost invisible beyond their utility to the player. And this was a moment where people actually talked about them beyond that. Admittedly it was still only kind of about the horses; it was really more about “Our game is so realistic. It’s the most realistic game ever. Here’s a salient example.” But nonetheless, how did you feel about that being such a big part of the discussion around that game?
Alice: Definitely mixed feelings in the sense of, as you say, the horse testicle thing is more of a stand in – both for people who like Red Dead as a way of [saying] “It’s so realistic that even the horse balls shrink and grow,” but also for the game’s detractors who are like “That game has so much padding and detail I don’t care about; you should have done this or that instead of spending time on your horse testicles.”
My actual opinion on Red Dead horse balls is that there’s too many of them, because there’s no reason for that many horses to be stallions. So, quick horse anatomy lesson: A stallion is an uncastrated male horse, and a gelding is a castrated male horse. Gelding horses is a practice that goes back thousands of years. It wasn’t always popular in all cultures, but it was definitely popular and practiced in the American West. The reason for that was just that geldings are much easier to handle than stallions because they’re not distracted by female horses, to put it simply.
So there would not have been cowboys riding stallions everywhere. You would use mares or geldings. Is it a bad thing that all the horses in Red Dead have balls? No, but I find it weird! As an actual rider, you don’t see as many horse balls as you see in Red Dead.
And also, this is complete speculation, but I feel like by the time they revealed that fact, people were talking about it so much that they did something to the ratio of male and female horses you find so that enough people would see their goddamn horse balls. It can be genuinely hard to find a mare in Red Dead 2, which I also think is stupid. Also, prominent, static testicles in every screenshot I take of my horse in that game are just not something I need. And in motion, they look really fucking weird – I can’t believe I’m talking about horse ball physics again – no, these are not static. In your super hyper realistic game, it just looks wrong. It looks like they’re made of wood.
Does that mean I think Red Dead should have added horse ball physics to their game as well? Not really. I just think it’s a really fucking weird choice, a weird combo of priorities. It definitely did its job as a marketing gimmick. We’re still talking about it six years later. So I can’t fault anyone for doing that, but at the same time, I don’t take it seriously as a realism metric.
But it’s hard to deny that the Red Dead 2 horses are some of the best that exist. The people at Rockstar definitely put a lot of work into it that otherwise isn’t [usually done] with different breeds and behaviors – different models and characteristics. At the same time, I have some nitpicks with the models of Red Dead that put them into uncanny valley territory for me. How their ears move and how their mouths move is wrong to me, and so they look a bit off. But that might just be me.
I know a lot of horse-loving gamers who absolutely adore Red Dead. There’s people who play Red Dead specifically for the horses – people that meet on dedicated servers and in special communities and mod Red Dead so they can come together and do show jumping competitions, essentially. And I think that’s beautiful.
Nathan: That’s really cool. How big is that community?
Alice: The biggest community that I’m aware of is about 10,000 people, which is The Rift Trails. As far as I know, it got started in the horses-in-video-games Facebook group I launched a few years back – during covid, actually, when people started meeting up digitally and going on trail rides together during a time where, of course, many people were not allowed to visit their horses. That’s when I saw it starting, I believe. It’s possible something happened earlier. Red Dead Online has been out since 2018, but I think it got a big boost during the peak covid months of spring 2020.
Nathan: That’s one of those things, too, where I feel like it’s a beneficial side effect of that game’s horses being so good: Beyond what Rockstar intended for them, people found these other uses – these other ways to interact with what they had made.
Alice: Absolutely. In many ways it’s something that I love – that I think is super beautiful and nice. Community and play emerging from places where it wasn’t intended. And at the same time, I was like, I think there’s a market for games that target horse-loving people explicitly and make these sorts of experiences to begin with on all platforms, and not just modded on PC if you jump through 20 hoops to find them.
If that many people are willing to jump through so many hoops to get the horse gameplay they want, imagine how many people would play it if it was simply something they could buy and find organically rather than explicitly having to go look for it and be tech savvy enough to create that experience themselves.
Nathan: Are there any games along those lines currently in development or that have come out?
Alice: There are games that took inspiration from that or tried to provide something similar. … [One example is in] Star Stable Online, which is the biggest horse game there is, essentially. It’s an MMORPG aimed at 8- to 18-year old girls that nobody has heard of, but they have, like, 600,000 monthly active players, and it’s huge.
Nathan: Wow. Damn, good for them.
Alice: Yeah, there’s so many people that work in games and talk about games a lot that are not aware of the kinds of numbers these games pull. That’s why I mention them at every opportunity, because at some point I’m hoping to get some investors and publishers to listen.
Nathan: Well yeah, because based on what you’re saying, there’s clearly a bigger appetite for this than what is being provided for. There are more people who want these things.
Alice: Yeah, I would absolutely say that.
Nathan: Which is interesting, because I went into this episode thinking it would be about what games get wrong about horses physically, but maybe the biggest misconception is this idea that there’s not an audience for games about horses.
Alice: I totally agree, and that’s why part of my work is essentially trying to gather that evidence. That’s why I like to shine a light on these modding communities and why I like to shine a light on bad horse games that still get players – because they’re the only ones offering this particular experience. Because what I want out of this is better horse games. In that way, it’s a very selfish endeavor. Even though we’ve seen improvements in the past few years, there’s still so much untapped potential.
