**The reason I put two dates is because for most of us, the game "died" in 2008, with the major changed HL made. And for others, the game didn't die at all.**

Just logged in and this is what's been posted:

   Dear Horseland Players,

I'm writing to you with some sad news. After more than 20 years, we will be shutting down Horseland at the end of this year. Starting January 1, 2019, the entire website will be down. Players won't have access to any of their pages, animals, images, etc.

It was a really hard decision for our entire team. We've loved being part of this amazing community with you for so many years. As you may know, the main parts of the Horseland game use "Flash" technology. This technology is obsolete, and is no longer able to run on many devices. The future of gaming is in apps. But the cost to develop and run a successful app is prohibitive.

As you may be aware, the Horseland game started in 1994 when I was a girl. I was obsessed with horses and took riding lessons - but never had a horse of my own. I begged my parents nearly every day for a horse. It was then that my father, who was a computer engineer, helped create the original Horseland game for and (eventually) with me. It was how I learned to love computer programming, which I later studied in college and did for a career. The game grew from basic bulletin boards, to a very popular text and 2D image based game. In 2006 we partnered with a cartoon company. They made the Horseland cartoon that ran on CBS, and we updated the game to include 3D shows, the World, and player and horse avatars.

Special thanks to the ModSquad who helped make Horseland a real community!

Please take screenshots and download images of anything you might like to save after the website is down.

We will miss you and all our players.

Best Regards,
Christina
President of Horseland

I just joined HP since everyone else from horseland is on here so im here to express my sentiments to HL as well. I grew up playing Hl and I will greatly miss the game . It did go stale around 2008 but in reality that game never died to me. It was always so fun and I made so many friends and meories on that site. Farewell Hl.

- Former player Adagio (7510981), and Bargain Horse (7636538)

I joined Horseland back in 2003 when I was a sad 11 year old kid who had no friends irl and got bullied a lot at school. Honestly, Horseland was a very big part of my childhood and early teenage years; I miss the summers spent in the Arena and on AIM and MSN with my online friends, the HL auctions in AOL chatrooms, waking up very early in the morning and TV'ing like crazy. I didn't understand mental health back then, it was massively stigmatised...all I knew was that I was very sad and had a lot of issues which is most likely why I became addicted to my PC. My family had pretty much fell apart...

Like most, I learnt to code and make graphics...which is why I aimed for a career in the IT sector- and was successful!

Admittedly, the game pretty much screwed us all over in 2008, but by then I had moved to Horse Isle ('07) and eventually I found HP ('09)....

long live HP!

RIP Horseland - #450053 x

seeing all these huge account numbers makes me twitch XD -- 121939 (how i still have that ingrained is beyond me)
I was a punk back then and took serious offence and got tossed after the coin deal and well havent looked back

I had an account number in de 800k ish and after that I had 1064628 .... Still embedded in my mind lol

I'm loving reading your stories, guys!

My ID is 2194283. I remember it like I remember my family home's landline number! Haha!

Using the horse and dog searches on HL, I'm going to post a list of players I remember from my playing days. Many made their ways here to HP. Some stayed and some left.

Shaenne
Weetzie
Overture
Culbara
Skipwizard
Tink
Redline
Corazon
Aramac
Lone Wolf
Blue Crab

Man, it's been a while - I was on HL sometime around 2004-2005? Long enough ago that my user number was 7 digits and started with a '1' - I wish I remembered exactly what it was! I started out back when you could make your horse's breed designation whatever you wanted - I'll never forget the "sporks," "pet rocks," and other random "horse breeds" running around! Those were the days of Art Deco and other hugely overbred public studs. I also vaguely remember some debacle about cross-breeding Gelderlands and another breed to create "breedless" horses through a glitch. I remember entering shows with the help of an autominer to save my finger from the strain of clicking and how people used to name each class of the show a single word to make a longer sentence. I remember feeling super intimidated to talk to anyone in chat since it was frequented by bigshots with high-pointed animals.

I never really got any big projects underway but HL was definitely what got me into creating graphics, so I have to thank it for that much at least. there was one graphicmaker I completely idolized - Splash? something that started with an S I think - who did the most amazingly well-blended cutout/background combinations, especially of reining horses sliding. It definitely still inspires me to this day! Once the changeover happened I completely lost interest and moved on to forum roleplaying before I randomly heard about HP and joined in 2012 - though I was noncommittal and didn't really get serious about things until last November.

I hope everyone coming over from HL finds HP as great as I have - it's definitely unlike anything else out there! :)

I wasn't overly active on HL, and I didn't really sink my teeth into anything spectacular but I did meet a few life-long friends on there! I also particularly remember three graphic artists and always find myself wondering how they're doing now! Not sure if anyone else will remember them, but s.ilent w.illow, Tribal (Tink) and atlante (I recall atlante at some point playing HP but not sure if she stuck around!)

Either way, I think HL has definitely passed its' peak and it's time for that chapter to close. 

Despite my thoughts, however, rest in peace Horseland! (every time I say the name of that website, a little voice inside my head just goes 'Let's go to Horseland yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!)

OH MAN Ade you nailed it - it was Tribal/Tink whose graphics I drooled over! I really wish I'd saved some of them for posterity to use as inspiration.

Wow. I have so many feelings.

I originally joined HL around this time in 2001.  A friend I had met online in a chat room (omggg) named Gabby introduced me to it.  I remember everything being so out of control and just fun.  You could type in whatever breed you wanted when you bought from the store or had a foal, which ultimately led to the great "Houseplant" breed invasion! The Heck's Fury Thoroughbreds, Sporks, on and on.  What a riot, when HL did away with that and introduced permanent breeds- and *scoffs* ADDED DOGS! So many players were very *tut tut* about dogs being added.  Gosh, I remember sitting in Jr High before school started, on the library computers attempting to train my little heart out- of course before shockwave was introduced, wayy before horse health.  I had a Lipizzaner stallion named "Loosing Nothing" that I got to 8k points, which was GOLD! And then clearing the browser history before school started because I was afraid to get in trouble haha!!

The overbred stallions are such a fun look back now.  Of course the epic Just Better, then his follow up of Penny Black.  Heck's Fury and then that Phobia-dude I can't pronounce/spell.  

I was breeding Andalusians when shockwave was first introduced.  We had shockwave briefly before the health tab was added, and I remember getting about 35k onto a mare in one night and we all thought WOW THIS IS AMAZE! And then... the health bar.  Thus leading to the Valentina Training Method, which we lived by.  I took a small break and then came back with a vengenace breeding Tennessee Walkers.  By this point we all had the autominer, so it was no big deal to have 40 horses rotating through on the auto click, with "The Method".  Suddently it was normal for everyone's horses to be able to reach 100k points by retirement.. almost unheard of before that point (unless of course, you were using scripts!).  

Lets also not forget the glitch to end all, with the "1 jump shows" that would net 1k points.  Sure you had to put a little effort into creating the actual show, but the results were insane.  It wasn't unheard of to put 1 million points on a horse in 1 day.

I kept to myself mostly, interacting with a few other Tennessee Walker breeders but that's about it.  I liked logging on to the game and just forgetting about real life and all the things going on with it.  It was a fun escape.

The name I went by for the longest time up until the big changes was Kiazt, #429546.  I doubt anyone remembers that name, but that was me.  

Mero, right?! I remember she did a line of AQH's and the horses were all dressed up in suits and dresses and I was always just in awe.

Eluh actually very much reminds me of Tink! Which is probably why I absolutely love Eluh's graphics! XD

sad to log on to HL this am to check feed, to see this . its sadder to think the time and $$ wasted along the years to just be erased =(  i spent so much $ on my TB and pitty lines. def a day i never saw coming even though its impossible to play - i still kept my lines fed . =[ played over 10 years, until the coin change crashed it . 

 I still remember my acct # too right off the top of my head like nothing haha. - 1868805. :P

Excuse the lack of captials, i'm having to use the onscreen keybaord as my keyboads's shift and caps lock isn't working, and its driving me mental. 

I played horseland since a kid think i was 11-12 - 2001 / 2002, then lost the account and got a new account which was 1817315 tourniquent, same as it is on here. I left, when it went 3d and awful. From 100s mill to a mesely 40k coins or whatever it was. 

I can get it to run on safrafi 5.1.7 and it all worked perfectly fine, just a bit slow as flash is old, is outdated and so limited. 

I had a few horses over 250k plus, but left them to 'rot' when the game changed and they've dissapered, always was a premium player untill it went all 3d and cartoony.  started up again a couple of weeks ago, to be told a few days alter it's going to be shut down again. I must admit I was a bit gutted at first, and googled games like horseland and this site came up, and to be honest this is alot better than the orginal horseland ever was. 

I do have to thank horseland though, as if it wasn't for the game, i would of never of found my love for graphics and coding. It was because of horseland, i decided to take a career path into css html and design. Graduated uni in 2014 (a little later as i was 24) and had a kick ass job from it, and loved it and a couple of inbetween and going self employed. 

oh darn that means my oldest wolf will gone Grey Demond RIP boy 

I have acct 178 and other 4-5 numbered accts on there but I also quit in 2009 when I couldnt feed over 7000 animals :(

they should have never gotten greedy, they should have left it the way it was then maybe we would still be playing and they would still be making money

The shut down of HL kind of led me back to this game, in hopes I could find some long lost friends. Most of my buddies quit during 2009-12 when they just couldn't adapt. I never got into HP, went on to play another horse sim game, but I'm thinking about coming back and trying it out if it's a similar, friendly community like old HL.

I played HL since 2002, and while I'm bitter about it's decline and juvenile changes like everyone else, it did produce great childhood memories for me and my IRL friends. I had brought up that HL was shutting down the other day to them and we went on for HOURS just talking about our experience and the friends we made there. Early 2000's was just a weird time for the internet and I don't know if that could ever be duplicated.

But yeah, I'm only surprised that it took this long for that game to be deleted. Been a ghost town it seems since 2012.

RIP HL, # 572243

RIP Horseland

I started playing way back in 2003 when a friend introduced me to it. I still remember the first time I ever used photoshop was to create something for Horseland...it was horrendous xD My freshman year of high school I had my computer class vote on who should win a layout contest I hosted. Wow I was a dork. Years later, when interviewing for my current job, they asked me how I learned HTML/CSS and my boss laughed when I said a horse sim. Basically HL was a big part of my life. I'm glad to have HP which I hope continues being a part of my life for years to come. Viva la Horse Phenomena!

Not long to go until D-Day.... :|

Wow I didn't realise this. I was an ooold player. I can't remember when I joined? Maybe I was 13 or 14. I was there for quite a few years. My account was #985682... which is a pretty low account number lol. Useless info to remember hey! I looooved the old style HL. If they never changed, they probably would've remained the TOP sim game on the internet. I quit after their stupid childish update as well. Although I was a less active player before fully quitting when I found out about www.smallcritters.com. Unfortunately SC was also shut down for good after Jan 1, 2019. I really really hope that HP doesn't meet the same fate, but I strongly suspect with apps and fb games being the "new" thing, these games probably don't make enough money to survive anymore :( *sad face*. 

i dont think hp is going anywhere anytime soon ;)

im gunna second maha, we are here for the long run! i even commented on the 500k forum post that were all gunna still be playing that thread game when were like 50 xD