About this website

The Mane Quest is intended to bring together horse-interested gamers and game-interested equestrians. Horses in video games may be something of a niche interest, but it happens to be my niche, the overlap of my beloved hobbies and my job. And the more I talk about this subject, the more I realize I’m not alone in my interest in it.

I am convinced that the horse game market is underserved, that a lot of interested people are out there waiting for genuinely good video games that treat horse riding, caring or breeding with at least some of the complexity it deserves. The Mane Quest is intended to help these people find out what games exist and which are worth playing for which reasons.

The Mane Quest has been featured on multiple other sites:

• Polygon: Why horses are so hard for video games to get right

• Eurogamer: What Games Get Wrong About Horses

• The Mary Sue: ‘The Mane Quest’s Alice Ruppert on ‘Horse Tales’ and How Making Indie Games Is a Canter, Not a Gallop

• The Mary Sue: The Galloping Return of the Horse Game

• PreMortem Games: The authority on game horses makes her own horse game

• Indie Game Website: Mucking Out The Stables of Horse Games

• Horse Canada: Horse Play – Inside the World of Gaming and Horses

About The Author

Unless otherwise noted, all content on The Mane Quest has been written by Alice Ruppert.

I am a game designer, producer and writer based in Zurich, Switzerland.
If you’d like to know more about me and my projects, visit aliceruppert.ch.

I’ve been taking weekly horse riding lessons for most of my life, but I have never owned a horse, nor has my education been in any way horse related. In writing The Mane Quest, I’m spending more time with horse-related research and I am thrilled to expand on my equine knowledge. I don’t claim to be an expert on horses in general, but I have been developing a quite specific expertise especially where the overlap of real horses and representations of horses is concerned. I’m also very eager to improve my own riding and horse handling skills and to soak up more information regarding ethical, animal-friendly horse-handling and classical dressage training that is biomechanically healthy and beneficial for the animal.

I took lessons at Reitstall Obermeilen for over twenty years. Nowadays I go on trail rides with the school horses at Reiko’s Reitzentrum, mainly a buckskin PRE gelding called Ollero.

For more regular updates, follow me on Twitter at @MaliceDaFirenze. For professional connections, feel free to add me on LinkedIn