I randomly decided to use my break from law school as a nostalgic/creative outlet (did anyone play those non-automated games in the 90s & 00s?!), and put together a little website for Denoux Stud that pulls everything into one place – stallion pages with race records and progeny highlights.
Each stallion has his own page with:
Full race résumé and career highlights
Key progeny and what they seem to throw
Surfaces/distances they excel at
There’s also a Racing Highlights section that looks at Denoux Stud runners year by year – graded/Group wins, BS/BC results, and the most consistent stakes performers in each season – so you can see what the program has actually done on the track, not just on paper.
…and, of course, some extremely serious fake farm marketing.
Love it! Really well done site, too. I hope it was a fun side project.
Also, this made me laugh
did anyone play those non-automated games in the 90s & 00s?!
as FF started as a non-automated sim in 1997*. I spent a few weeks rolling dice to determine race results before going “F that” (not really, as I was a super goody two-shoes and never swore as a kid) and learning to code.
* I think technically it started earlier as it was someone else’s project…can’t even remember what they called it. And after a few months they gave up and I took it over.
No, though I was in Webrunners as well, back in the day. I’m not sure if it’s still going, I know the original runner of it stepped down…probably a decade ago. And a more tech-y person took over, who was going to actually do some coding for it so it was more than just a forum and a DOS file.
Fun side note - FF started coding-wise because I tried to reverse-engineer the DOS file that ran the races. Supposedly the guy who wrote it did it in about a weekend. I probably spent a year, and horses have like 50 stats now related to racing (let alone breeding), whereas the DOS version had, I think, 8.
I imagine that these days, if I still had the DOS program, I could run something that would actually give me intelligent code back out, and figure out exactly what he threw together in a weekend. But I prefer our version. (His version tended to produce super horses who were unbeatable, which was fun when you owned one, but less fun when you spent years racing against one.)
This is amazing! I had a lot of fun browsing the site and it definitely is a trip down memory lane, although this website looks a lot better than teenage me managed to put together, lol.
I think I’ll definitely take inspiration from you and record my stables graded performances each year somewhere, it must be fun to revisit it from time to time and see the horses that were the stars of your stable in the past and to see the performance improving every year!
I also can’t believe that FF started in 1997.. in just two years the game will celebrate it’s 30th birthday!
I remember having to code all my websites from scratch for those earlier games and we made pages for every horse. I often had upwards of 50 horses or more, and we did facilities pages even! I still have some of them saved to a USB drive. I could not imagine doing that these days! Finding photos for 6 stallions was plenty. This was also simply dragging and dropping, Google Sites reminds me of the old Geocities.
I also remember being the banker for one sim game and using my notebook to update people’s balances. I think that only lasted a month before someone figured out how to code a bank. I also tried doing the notebook for horses’ show records & points until someone told me to use a spreadsheet haha
Wasn’t the DOS file called Stretch Drive? I think I remember that going around and there were a few racing games that opened with it.
Love learning all the fun facts & history behind FF!
Yep, that’s the one. Good ole’ Stretch Drive. You could open the horses’ text files (if you knew which horse was which number) and just look at their raw stats. Doing races was a PITA though, because it had no concept of entries pre-race, so each race was “ok, Ranger…what number is he…ok, 57. Crap, typed 75. OK, on to the next…”. Hence my desire to code my own thing that could (mostly) figure its own stuff out.
Wow, what a fun idea! I enjoyed reading through your site and you did a really good job making it look nice. I might also have to start keeping track of all my stakes winners throughout the year - great idea!
Denoux Stud Website
I hope it was a fun side project.
I spent a few weeks rolling dice to determine race results before going “F that” (not really, as I was a super goody two-shoes and never swore as a kid) and learning to code.