Nope, this one has to be the record for the oldest thread dug up!

I think you beat my previous "spot" of 1 year and 7 months Supercat, I make this one 3 years, 1 month and 18 days.

Maybe when Paul wrote "appeals to all ages" he meant Iron age, bronze age, dark ages, middle ages..............." !!

not any more

I remember playing "The Racing Game" for the speccy. It was very similar to Stable Masters, you owned a string of horses and had to find out what distance and going suited them best via comments after the race. You also had to allocate training to get them to full fitness and give jockey instructions before the race. If they won or ran well their handicap would rise and I think the horses would improve with their higher rating until they became Group class as you could never win a Group race with a lowly rated horse. There was betting for each race and at the start of the game you could rename the horses in your stable.
I was wondering if Mark was involved with "The Racing Game" or whether he used this game as a blueprint for Stable Masters as there are a lot if similarities.
The graphics for the game were pretty poor but the gameplay had me hooked for longer than I care to remember ( where have I heard that before).

This is the original game - stable masters (1994) that I still have:-

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=6773

Museum piece!

Well I never heard of that game! Either my addled memory is in a worse state than I think or (and a quick google confirms it was released in 86') I had moved on from the speccy to the Atari ST.

The only horse racing game I remember playing on the Spectrum was 'Sport of Kings'. I played that quite a lot and it was partly written in Sinclair basic and by pressing escape the game would stop and drop out to the command line allowing you to edit the code. I remember persuading friends to bet their hard earned pocket money on the races and I don't think they ever noticed that during the race my hand would surreptitiously brush over the top keyboard buttons and thereafter the horse carrying my money would suddenly put on a spurt and win. I still feel bad about that.

Horse racing simulator was the first horse racing game I wrote (on the ST - and it later became SM) and was probably influenced by SOK but mainly I just wanted to make a game that tied the form together in a semi meaningful way and let you analyse form and bet on races and I got fed up of waiting for someone else to do it. Little did I know I would be back to doing the same thing some 30 years later! It's funny how things turn out.

So mark with his 900th post opens up with revelations of the world of corruption in video games, what next? Being, I imagine a fair bit younger than most of you, I don't remember any of these games, and previously stable king had been my only taste of a horse racing sim with some level of detail, so you can imagine my excitement at having stumbled across what appeared to be the game I had been looking for for years completely by accident after searching for a racing app for my then new iphone, and I was actually surprised and still am to this day that it hasn't made it onto a larger market, though I suppose it's limiting factor is the actual premise of the game itself, racing.

I bet I'm as young, if not younger than you! I cannot believe you heard about SO so late!! I've played every version, I assumed you had been a closet player and discovered the forum late!

One of my early posts, but have always maintained a keen interest in racing and got into the game really quickly.