Equideow

When I was around 9 or 10 years old, equideow was pretty popular around my school. It’s an online game about taking care of horses and handling your own equestrian centre. Some of my friends at the time, who were into horse riding, introduced me to it. If you are not french, you may know the game as howrse, which is the international server. I have no memory of howrse as a child, but i read that it actually went online at the same time as the original game (2005).

To be honest, the part i was the most interested in was not the horses or any of the actual ‘game’. Equideow has an entire social side to it, akin to a social media platform. each player has their own bio, you can add other people as friends, there are forums linked to equestrian centres, and more importantly, you have the possibility of sending private messages to other players. This revolutionised my and my friends’ social lives, as we were now able to communicate outside of school (this was before we had cellphones or used skype at the time).

Equideow was also significant to me as it was my introduction to talking with complete strangers online. Even though it was a children’s game, my parents had complete forbid me to ever talk with anyone i didn’t know in real life, which i of course absolutely always did. To set some context, i grew up as an only child with divorced parents who were rarely home, in a smaller city in the conservative-leaning south of France. When i started lurking on the internet and noticed there were other people who were into what i liked (anime and video games mostly, which weren’t all that popular without being cringe in 2010-2015), i realised i could finally be able to share things with others. So, naturally, i was the first to reach out and dm someone if i like their pfp on equideow.

I remember talking to a lot of different people, but only few stayed as actual online friends. Very often they also knew O, one of my best friends at the time, who was more popular on the game. When we started middle school we sort of all moved to skype to talk to each other.

I quickly became obsessed with online games and forums after being on equideow. I cannot remember exactly how many places i created an account on but it was a lot. notably, i remember amour sucré (my candy love, which i found out years after was very popular), i think some hamster game that was also created by owlient, moviestarplanet of course, and later, a bunch of forumactif sites, the ones i stayed around the most being some homestuck, hetalia, and pandora hearts forums.

Now i want to talk about another feature of equideow that i strongly remember, that isn’t used as much anymore : the forums. Each player who has an equestrian center in the game is able to have their own forum linked to their page, with whatever topics they want to create on it, and anybody can come and interact and add messages. When i was a kid, typically, you could find a bunch of different topics like floods (a free topic where people could talk about whatever, or even spam images and stuff), people who knew how to use photofiltre 7 and html/css had topics where you could commission custom pfps and presentation pages, and of course roleplaying topics.

I was never too much into roleplaying myself, but i remember trying it out and lingering on roleplaying forums, because my friend o used to be really good at it. The ones i hung out on were mostly about wolves. I used to make wolf designs with free to use linearts on paint.

About two years ago i decided to make a new account on equideow for nostalgia, and i have been enjoying playing the game again. I am actually taking care of the horses this time and focusing on getting a better ranking and trophies. I don’t really talk to anybody there, but i do have some friends on my page, just people who have randomly asked me to add each other. Most of the players i see now are adults, either people who used to play as children and came back for the same reason as me, or adults who have been on the site for over ten years now. Though, most people tend not to share as much about themselves as we used to.

I’ve also created an account on the howrse too this time. I’m kind of playing on and off on both servers, only logging in occasionally. I almost exclusively play on the gaia server on equideow (there are two, the other is ouranos), which is the one i used to play on when i was a kid too.

It’s crazy how much more diverse howrse is compared to equideow, in terms of people. There are players from lots of different countries (i would’ve loved this as a kid), coming from all different places. Today i read a woman’s presentation page, and she was explaining she was a 50-something year old rancher living in colorado i think, and her husband, who was taking care of the ranch with her and also on the game, had passed away and now being on howrse was bumming her out. Strangely i wouldn’t have thought to find people like her on my silly childhood online game.

Anyways, i think that’s all i wanted to say about that. Here are my accounts on equideow and howrse, if you are curious. I have had times where i’d get overly nostalgic these past few years, and i have been reexploring these bits of my childhood occasionally. I might write about other things if i find that there is enough to talk about.

posted on 10/10/25