#nethorse

[feminon]

Ok so putting this under a readmore cus its going to be a Long and rambly talk down memory lane but I’m on a quest to find the artist of a design that was floating round the internet in the noughties that could have been pretty influential to you if you happened to be as obsessed with horses as I was.

Do you know what this is?

Cute yeah? 

Its a nethorse, a netpony, and I’m not actually entirely sure if this was a phenomenon outside of Scandinavia but if you lived there like I did you would have known them as “netheste” and they were incredibly popular. 

Long talk about weird virtual horse site culture under the cut (there’s gifs)

If you were the type of horse-obsessed kid I was, you will have undoubtedly scoured the internet for “Horse Games” to consume, ideally ones that allowed you to act out your dreams of owning a horse of your very own. One of the avenues of achieving this was through the popularity of netheste websites - usually hosted on webbyen.dk (a now defunct site-hosting company tht allowed anyone to run a limited site for free in exchange for ad revenue) and run by other likeminded kids with (mostly) limited HTML knowledge, an arsenal of tacky gifs, pixel art, autoplay, and rly ambitious choices of colour. The size of these sites increased the more clicks you got on the ads that were integrated into them, so it was common for site owners to implore visitors to click their ads with promise of future developments and more exciting virtual horse experiences.

The concept was really simple, it was forum based and you were to roleplay ownership of virtual horses with others on the sites, you roleplayed riding, caring for them, entering competitions, breeding, you name it. 

You acquired them by either reserving a horse available on tht site that you wanted, roleplaying a job for a sufficient amount of time to get fake currency to “buy” a horse, or submit your own pictures of your dream steed. 

Sometimes these fictional horses were represented by real (stolen) photos but mostly they were known from the same basic design, a simple pixel art pony adoptable that could be modified and re-coloured endlessly in mspaint to your hearts content.

Now I can come nowhere near to giving you an idea of just how many variations of this fucking pony there was - it was literally thousands. There were endless variations on the poses, and body type, mane and tail, animations, there were foals and pregnant mares and horses with horns and wings. There was no limit to how they looked, the only thing stopping you was your own mspaint skills, the rules of the nethest site your horse was living in, or your ability to steal a design you wanted. The excitement the modification of these things incited was sparkledog proportions, it was ridiculous. Here’s an example of the (nowhere near exhaustive) collection of templates you could be offered on a site if you were designing your own

(LINK)

Tack and equipment as well - i cant remember the specifics but depending on the expertise and the time of the people running the sites I think they would edit tack onto your horse after you’d purchased it/reserved it but it just added to the multitude of possible designs.

It became a point of pride to save as many variations of these shitty ponies as you could find to your poor old computer or even, if you were determined enough, to open up your own website for kids to roleplay on and claim their fictional nethest, and begin the cycle anew. I myself had an old memory stick with 1GB (which mind you was a LOT back then) worth of these fucking things saved and I lost it somewhere moving houses and it RUINED me.

People were really possessive of the designs they had found/modified, and it got so bad that it became the norm for a lot of sites to code it so that you weren’t able to right-click on their site without a large obnoxious alert popping up to tell you to fuck off and not steal their fictional second hand mspaint horses.

Now barely any of these sites seem to exist anymore (seeing as they were mostly all hosted on webbyen which as mentioned before is sadly, defunct) so its taken me quite a bit to find info on them that hasn’t succumbed to the passage of time.

Somewhere along the way people started being able to shade them more realistically (LINK) a no doubt exciting development that I missed seeing as I had passed out of my horse phase and was neck deep into anime at that point. All the better honestly, call me a virtual horse traditionalist but I prefer my horses unshaded, undithered, and anti-aliased only by the unfortunate and unintentional compression of a thousand saved JPEGs

 But there are apparently still people running sites based off the same concept - Just looking at the designs makes it obvious its just the same designs traced to create something mildly unsettling (that could just be because I prefer the old designs though) but I admire the tenacity of the 21 yrold who’s still out there living the dream with these fictional web horses. 

The site is here by the way (it is in Danish)

With all the influence these things had, I’m really curious to know who the original artist was. The origins of them were lost by the time I discovered them, after they had been cannibalised by a thousand horse hungry kids but they’re just so iconic to me I really want to know who first made them. 

I’m hoping this post will potentially be reblogged, just in case someone might know the original artist, or if anyone else has experienced this mess and wants to blight their blog with the memory of it. Please be my guest.

I’ve found a few blogs that aren’t active, but are still up that has more examples of the cursed horses (all in danish, I might do a followup with some translations to really capture the feel of these sites but for now here they are)

(LINK)

(LINK)

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(LINK)