Blake Andrews On 'Horse Race Tests' And Reining It All In


An Interview With The Creator Of The Cult Twitter Project

By O.A. CARRY FOR: 65,000〡PUBLISHED: April 24th, 2025

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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].

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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.

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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.

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Are they rigged? [This is just an interrogation now. I'm secretly one of the ones sending them threats.]

They're rigged in a way that is … not what people think. I think people think I have favoritism to the horses, but that's not really- It's just more what video length I can fit on Twitter or whatever.

Cartoons seem to be an influence on you. What's your opinion on Family Guy?

[Laughs] Oh, I like it. I grew up watching it. I like when Lois saw Peter having sex with her mom, that was the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life. Do you remember that episode?

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah.

I've had long arguments with art school friends where I'm defending the art style and the animation quality. There's a clipart quality to Seth McFarland's style. I have an attachment to that clipart kind of look.

Is that what you take from his work?

Yeah, definitely. I feel like his style of cartooning is like, you open a "How to Draw Cartoons" book, and then you just follow it exactly, which I think is cool.

The coloring in Family Guy is very generic. It's very blank. There's no "mood" at all. It's a deadpan quality that I think people don't really pick up on.

Like The Simpsons is cartoon, so it looks like a cartoon. King of the Hill is too grounded, it's muted. But Family Guy, it is just descriptive, there's no tone. There's something dead about it. I like that.

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Sometimes when I'm looking at the Horse Race Tests, I'm thinking: Marble Races, Family Guy-Subway Surfers, our current culture's interest in random visual snow to just occupy ourselves … But with you, it's like you're challenging that slop, AI and "visual snow" method of engagement because you're making it—it's got your touch—and the horses are just these simple characters to latch onto. The fleshing out is done by the viral fan art uploaded during the week when people are waiting patiently. Does that resonate with you?

I love the videos where Peter Griffin is speaking in Arabic [laughs].

There's this subsect of them where it's about emo subgenres instead. I'm addicted to watching those because I personally enjoy the knowledge I'm getting from Peter.

I see the symbol of the bouncing DVD logo in a lot of your work, like in your games, animations and even on your website's homepage. So, what's the significance?

My friend Flan, who wrote about ambient games, one of the things they would talk about is how the DVD logo bouncing around is a game that you play without a controller. You come up with the game in your head.

I did a lot of game-making in my head as a kid, especially being alone by myself. Like, you're walking and you can't touch cracks, for example. I do this weird thing sometimes where if I touch my fingernail, I have to do it in a certain order.

The DVD bouncing is like that. It's also a clipart kind of thing. It's this random element—this genericized symbol—which I appreciate. It's kind of a ready-made game in some sort of a way.

Earlier, you were talking about how video games make you enter a "third place," and you were talking about that in the context of watching people at Wonderville walk around like ants.

[Laughs] Yeah.

Is watching the DVD symbol like entering that third place?

Definitely. Well, I feel like there's the idea of the "Magic circle."

There's this concept in game design where, if you're playing a game, you hold importance to things that are unimportant, like, as soon as you look at the DVD menu, you're kind of transported into this state where you've attributed rules to it and you've given importance to them.

I think that's also happening with the horse games. People just started playing it, people started putting the importance onto it. I feel like they got transported into this magic circle.

And this horse race moment is so awesome because I've been making games for over 10 years, and virtually no one has played most of them. And now I'm getting comments on my old games.

I heard you made your first game back in 2013. Was that Breaking Bread?

That was the first one that I published, but I had made some before that. I had just graduated from undergrad and I was working these really odd jobs, like for this Jewish teledonation center for kids with cancer.

I first started working on a teledonation game, but then I was watching Breaking Bad at the time, and I was having these really irritating conversations with some of my friends about the characters, and I thought that that would be a funnier game.

I had just read Rise of the Video Game Zinesters by Anna Anthropy, and it mentioned the website, Glorious Trainwrecks, and some games by one of my favorite game developers, Sylvie. I played her game, and I was like, "Oh, this is awesome."

I used this program called Klik & Play for Schools, which is a really rudimentary, '90s game development software.

So, how did memes and internet chatter influence Breaking Bread?

Well, on Glorious Trainwrecks, there were some memes already present on there, but they were contained on the website. People would make a game and then wanna respond to other people's games. There's a yellow jogger running around who was a meme on that website. The clipart raptor in Breaking Bread is from the same asset pack.

The gameplay and dialogue were mostly just responding to the popular culture of people on Reddit or whatever, talking about Breaking Bad. I was focused on that and then specific personal conversations that I had.

More of my later games were memes that were about Glorious Trainwrecks, which is cool. I feel like there aren't as many small, contained websites like that. The memes on those forums kind of just stayed on those forums.

As a kid, I wasn't really allowed to go outside that much, or do that much, or be with friends. In my teenage years, I would go home. I wouldn't be allowed to go outside. My home actually had double locks, so I would need a key to get out of the house.

I was on Gaia Online and the early years of 4chan. I would just be on the internet pretty much all the time, which is maybe a little bit unusual, but I feel like I've met other people with similar experiences.

Yeah, it sounds pretty sheltered. Is that why community is so important to your practice?

I don't know. I mean, it's probably from being shut in as a kid [laughs].

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Are you a New Yorker?

I'm not from here, but I've lived here for 15 years or so. I grew up in Atlantic City and in Ohio. I moved here for college. I've been here since then.

How long were you in Atlantic City?

For eight years [laughs]. That sounds really [laughs], especially because of all the gambling stuff.

Yeah, years one through eight were spent in the trenches, betting on horses.

Yeah, it was pretty cool. The boardwalk's nice, especially back then. You could get saltwater taffy.

So you're from Ohio, how did you feel when the Ohio memes were popping off?

Hmm, there's one guy on TikTok who I follow. He pretends to be a Baki character or something?

Oh, you're talking about the Ohio Final Boss?

Yeah, I really like that guy. Just him rolling his eyes in the back of his head and just doing these really powerful things is so scary. I love Baki. I think it's the coolest.

What kind of clothes did you wear as a kid?

What kind of clothes did I wear as a kid [laughs]? I wasn't allowed to choose what I was wearing.

My grandparents and my mom are black, and when I was little, they would just dress me in FUBU all the time. This was when I was in Ohio, I would just be decked out in FUBU in the suburbs, and I'd be one of the only black kids there [laughs], just decked out in FUBU.

In high school, I would try to get Hot Topic stuff, but my grandma would throw that away.

So, how long have you been on the internet?

My mom went to school for computer science, and when I was very little, she would take me to classes and I would sit in the computer lab. I would do MS Paint drawings at like two years old or something.

My grandpa worked for a college, and so we had internet in the house in the '90s, which I feel like was a little bit unusual for a lot of people that early on. I would be on the internet a lot.

My mom would teach me how to use programs, and her friends made freeware games; they would share freeware games. So I was exposed from really early on to like, "Oh, you could just make a game if you want to?"

And I just played like mad amount of weird freeware stuff that I feel like not a lot of people even know about, just from an early age. Some of her friends were amateur game developers at the time. It was good to be exposed to all that stuff.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to direct a Sonic video game [laughs]. I was pretty set on that kind of a thing, and I just never changed my mind.

You went to school for painting, though?

I went to undergrad for painting, and then I went to grad school at NYU, and now I work there, which is cool. I went there when Bennett Foddy was teaching there, and Robert Yang, and Frank Lantz, who made Universal Paperclips.

It was a cool group and I felt like, "This will be my only chance. I don't know how long these people will actually be here. So, I'll just try it out, I guess." And who knows if it was a good idea or not [laughs].

You didn't see a future in painting?

I liked to do it and then, I guess, I started to see the art world stuff, and then realized that I just wasn't interested in the art gallery. "Selling paintings" I thought was pretty stupid, because it just feels like such a … It feels like an NFT [laughs]. I feel like the same reason I don't like NFTs is the same reason I don't like paintings, because only one person can have it.

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Did someone try and talk you into doing an NFT back in 2021, or whenever that was?

A bunch of people tried to get me on it, and I just kind of like … It's funny because I'm usually willing to at least think about weird, new things like that, but with NFTs, I was like, fuck it. Right out of the gate, I was like, I hate these things so much.

They were just the epitome of what you hated about art world bullshit?

NFTs are all of the stuff about the art world that I hate, and none of the social aspects. It's all just kind of crappy. They aren't AI-generated, but are instead these generated, sloppy images. Maybe in 10 years I'll have a nostalgia for that kind of thing [laughs], but not right now.

A lot of animals are featured in your work, so do you have a spirit animal or something?

I don't know if I have a spirit animal. I'm not a furry [laughs], despite what some people think.

I think I just really appreciate animals. I eat fish, but I don't eat a lot of meat. And especially a long time ago, I was a pretty militant vegan, and I care about animal rights and things like that. I have a close kinship to animals.

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The frog is probably my spirit animal, especially because of its relation to video games. A lot of my favorite games have frogs in them, like Kero Blaster. In Seaman, he turns into a frog-hybrid-creature at the end. And I really like Frogger. The one on PSX has this cool drum and bass soundtrack.

Yeah, it's a good video game animal because they're so dynamic and they have this specific movement.

Yeah, the jumping … And the tongue is also a great verb. The bright green color is so cool, and they have these big, goofy, stupid eyes. They're kind of mysterious, too. I think there's a mysterious quality to them.

They're just sloppy gross creatures, which I think is cool. I don't think I'm necessarily a frog, but I like them. And they're in a lot of my games. I put frogs in my games, and people frequently think the horses are frogs so …

Have your students found out about the horse races?

The funny thing is, when I first made it, before I posted it on Twitter, I was talking to them about prototyping games, and I showed them the horse game as an example of how to prototype.

I was teaching them that early on, you don't want to commit to graphics. These horses look like crap, but it's like having these horses in here shows me what the finished thing is going to look like.

My question was, is it interesting if these balls are just bouncing around? And I thought, yes.

I don't know if it's like an 8:00 AM class thing, but they had a non-reaction to it. That happens a lot when I show my games to them [laughs]. They play Valorant and League of Legends and want to make something like that.

So what's next? Do you think you're going to be doing the horse races for many months to come?

Well, I think my plan now is to work up to my friend's party, and then I'm going to take a break. [Laughs] I'm going to be going to Europe to visit some friends and some things like that. So I have to take a break, but I mean, maybe I won't stop it.

I want to do a big tournament that would be live, where no one can say that it's rigged. I thought, "Oh, it would be cool if people (almost like a marathon) if people could sponsor horses to be entered into a tournament." Then it would be like a charity tournament.

I have ideas for how it can continue, but I think it all just depends on people's interest. I can imagine how I could continue it forever. But at this moment, I'm just trying to go day by day.

I have plenty of other game ideas, and I'm working on a platform fighter called Smush Bois right now. That's the main thing I've been working on.

I feel like there's always been, in my mind, "Oh, something I will do will pop off at some point," and then people will have this huge backlog of stuff to explore.

There's some part of me where I'm like, "How do I keep the horse races going? Is it in my control, even if I do everything perfectly?" I guess, it doesn't matter. Maybe I'll just go insane.

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