Why horses are a huge challenge for video game developers

As a self-professed horse girl, I’ve always appreciated when video games gives me the chance to ride. But what goes into getting humankind’s favorite, majestic, finger-nail strutting freaks of nature into video games?

It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Like all quadrupeds horses are more difficult toanimate than bipeds such as humans.

“As soon as you have more legs, you have a lot of options. You need to put more thought into ‘when does which leg does what,’” Alice Ruppert told me. Ruppert, a creative producer with Aesir Interactive is currently working on Horse Tales: Emerald Valley RanchHorse games will be available this winter in the form of.

Importantly, Ruppert also runs The Mane Quest: gaming’s only horse-focused website. On The Mane Quest, Alice reviews gaming’s horses and writes more generally about how horses are used in video games.

Horses have more legs than the average videogame character. Other qualities make animating horses difficult.

“A horse’s legs has very, very few muscles on it, or like their lower legs do not have muscles on them,” Ruppert said. Horses, which are heavy animals, can move deceptively well on their long legs. Because of their amazing tendons, horses can move on deceptively slender legs.

The tendons in a horse’s legs work like rubber bands, absorbing half a ton of weight and then releasing it in a burst. That’s how Thoroughbred racehorses run so damn fast, even though their legs are disproportionately slender compared to their massive weight.

(If you’d like to learn more about how horses move, there is a fantastic episode of Inside Nature’s GiantsIt is not a secret that they do dissect horses in them, so be aware! (I will never again be like that.

Because their movement relies on tension and release, and the bending of some very curious joints, horses have a bouncy gait that doesn’t always translate into games.

“You know, when you make a simple humanoid animation, you can get away with like, having one joint in the hand,” Ruppert told me. “But for a horse, for the movement to look good, you’ll have to consider every one of these joints, because otherwise you’re gonna have some weirdness in it.”

Horse movement isn’t the only thing that games sometimes give short shrift to. Horses are often treated more as animals than people in many video games. Horses have a huge narrative potential in games.

Check out our video to learn more about how horses get translated into games, and why it’s so important to get them right. And if you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to Polygon on YouTube and now on TikTok!