Howrse

Howrse was made by Owlient, I THINK it was made in 2000ish... This was from Ow:

Owlient gathers communities of enthousiasts with passion games, to let them extend their hobby online and share it with other people.

A real ability have been built to design games with a maximum of interaction between players. A passion game created by Owlient is played with thousand of other players, building the virtual world scenario and participating to its evolution.

Today, Owlient offers its product to passionates of horses, child-rearing and fashion, over six languages (french, english, german, spanish, russian and portuguese). Owlient’s efforts are directed toward designing new passion games and extend its international offer.

HISTORY
Olient and Equideo.com (the «OW» came later) were born the same day, on September 8th, 2005. Equideo.com at the early morning from a student room after a long night of debugging and a year of intensive development. Owlient was born few hours later near Paris.

This first day was the beginning of a long story, since in the afternoon, connected from a cyber-café, the two founders saw the first euro of sales generated from Equideo, just a few hours after the launch !

Olient was then the contraction of the two founders’ first name, Olivier Issaly and Vincent Guth. Having learned Web development alone, Vincent and Olivier met at the Université Paris-Sud IT high school. During the 2004 summer, they merged their respective project to create hariCow, a web development framework based on LAMP architecture, used for every Owlient project. A year later, Equideo.com was online. In 2006, considering the succes of the game, the two founders decided to stop their studies and to work exclusively to develop Owlient.

Since that day, Vincent and Olivier developped Owlient on a pace of rapid growth, supported by the quality of its product. In April 2008, Owlient has raised 3M€ from Innovacom to accelerate its growth.