Blake Andrews On 'Horse Race Tests' And Reining It All In
An Interview With The Creator Of The Cult Twitter Project
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Two horses are making out on your Twitter timeline. Another one, that's cyan-colored, is in the corner crying. That kinship you feel, radiating from the stallions, is natural. But looking broadly, what brought the horses (us) to this watering hole of fan art, fandom and character mania?
These depictions are all runoff from Horse Race Tests, a video game prototype adminned by the stable-keeper Blake Andrews on their account @snakesandrews.
The horse-like blobs are shown bouncing around a maze, hitting the walls, hitting themselves, all competing for that coveted carrot and all its glory.
The bright colors and oddly satisfying visuals stopped many people from scrolling further, leaving them lingering over the budding cult classic, becoming fans, and largely shaping the "lore" people have come to know.
There's Jovial Merryment, the undisputed GOAT, whose win numbers dwarf all the other steeds. Yellow horse is their supposed lover, followed by the tumultuous relationship that White and Cyan share; they're two losers who've joined forces despite the cultural differences in their fanbases (we'll get to that later).
The list goes on. The race goes on. And some are wondering, how far will this thing go?
One of those wonderers is Blake themself. Last Monday, I met them at a restaurant called Little Poland in the Ukrainian Village. The menu had a statue of a horse on it. "This is beautiful," Blake said, as they leaned forward to take a closer look. The horse on their baseball cap bucked at me, and then it stopped moving, like I was hallucinating it or something.
We ordered pierogis, and while they came, I decided to ask the important questions.
So, what's up with the yuri?
[Laughs] I mean it's cool. It's interesting. I'm not jerking off to it if that's what you're asking [laughs]. It feels like they're my children, so, it would be really sick to do that. But, I know my children are also, you know, sexual beings. Whatever they feel like doing, I guess…
A lot of my appreciation for video games comes from fan art so, I feel super honored. It's just surprising. I didn't think two blob horses bouncing around a room would be romantic or sexual. But I guess when I put it like that, it sounds really, really sexual.
I'm really fucking with it in a way because it makes it look like my game is about horny anime girls [laughs].
Are they all girls?
I mean, I once said they were all male. I guess my head canon for my own game is that they're all male. I repost all these images. Because I'm like, "Oh, they're making the cut scenes for me." It's cool.
I think narrative games are kind of stupid in a lot of ways, and what's cool with the horse races is that the narrative is purely emergent. It's all just what the players are doing, how they're interacting with each other. People are coming up with these stories about these bouncing balls, which I think is so sick.
That's one cool thing that video games have over other art forms: the fact that people can project their thoughts on these abstract creatures. That doesn't happen the same way with a novel, where it's so literal.
Also, in a lot of media, there's the "official art" and the "fan stuff." I feel like with Horse Race Tests, the fan stuff is in many ways more official. There's no embedded narrative in my game, so the narrative they come up with is more valid than anything I could say. These people say that Cyan is trans, then that's valid. But people have actually been saying Jovial Merrymment is a white nationalist or something [laughs].
I was actually going to ask you about a tweet you posted, which said, "Some horses aren't woke … I'll let you guess which ones aren't." I saw the replies and someone photoshopped Jovial Merryment into January 6th. Is he the anti-woke horse?
[Laughs] I can't reveal. I can't reveal that. I don't want him to get canceled.
Can you address the rumors that Cyan is in purgatory?
I don't know how to respond … I was always planning on introducing evil horses, or like bad horses, some villain horses. I feel like it's just being read into. What's cool is that people are having fun with it. That's the best. Whatever you think is fair. I don't want to spoil anyone's head canon.
I think what's cool about the horse game so far is that the main fans of the game are trans women and groypers [laughs].
I think it's kind of cool that both groups yell at me, and both groups are sending me death threats. I think that's really cool that they can come together to fuck with me. Somehow, it feels good-spirited from both sides, even if one side [groypers] I don't really like.
You said you appreciate the "community" aspect of video games a lot. Did that appreciation influence your instinct to post Horse Race Tests on Twitter?
I feel like everything I'm talking about makes what happened sound really intentional, but it just simply wasn't.
Basically, my friend is hosting this casino party, and I've made a lot of games for events before, like I just made a game for this gay bar. They were throwing this big Halloween party and I made this art installation where you could jerk off Frankenstein, and he just starts screaming when you're jerking him off [laughs].
So my friend asked me to make this gambling game for her party, and I've had this idea for a horse racing game for a while, partly because my girlfriend bought me a bunch of Japanese N64 games and one of them was a horse racing game. She loves horses.
We tried to play it and it was all in Japanese, and even when we started Google translating everything, we still couldn't figure out how to play it. So I was like, oh, this is kind of fun. I'll just post this, because I've gotten into the habit of posting prototypes to Twitter just to see what people's reactions are.
I made a couple of changes after the first one—I added a timer and a couple of gradients—and then, since then, it took off.
What's funny is, people are interacting with it on Twitter exactly like I imagined for the party.
I was like, "I don't want there to be any interface. I don't want there to be a controller. I don't want people on their phones. There's no barrier to this interaction." I know that normal people simply don't have the time to fucking think about how many buttons are on an Xbox controller.
A lot of the games I've been making for the past couple of years, I start thinking, "How am I going to get somebody who's not interested in games to pick up and play, especially in an arcade setting?" I use my girlfriend as a litmus test a lot, like if she needs to use a controller.
I do a lot of stuff at Wonderville. I'm always up in the sound booth … It's funny, maybe this is derogatory, but up there, everyone looks like ants because most people do exactly the same thing; they always play the games in the same order.
And I always hear a boyfriend and girlfriend from up there. He usually mansplains all the games to her. It's like clockwork. She says, "I don't understand this. This is confusing." I like making games that avoid those questions.
And how does an online audience differ from an in-person one?
In person, when it's a larger audience, even if it's at your friend's house playing GTA or whatever, there's a performative quality, and I think that has translated online very well. There's some sort of social conditioning.
I think what's cool about the horse game is people are being performative in a way that is just completely unacceptable in real life [laughs], which I think is so fun. I mean, I'm getting suicide threats constantly.
Because Cyan horse isn't winning?
Yeah, like Cyan or White, most of the horses, except for Bullet'n Board, I get suicide and death threats for. It's pretty crazy.
It's like, I just went from getting rejected by every festival for the games I was making, got rejected by a publisher, all sorts of things like that ... Then it was just zero to "I'm going shoot myself with a shotgun" constantly [laughs].
There's something that I kind of enjoy about that. I hate really cute games. I hate cozy stuff. I hate that stuff a whole lot. And I feel like most of these people—I think, or hope—are just joking. It's a complex situation, but I like that these people don't give a fuck about me.
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