About

Horse Race Tests, also known as Horse Racing Tests and HRT, refers to an virtual race simulator by Twitter / X user @snakesandrews showing horse icons bouncing around a maze, representing a race track, to the end goal of a carrot. @snakesandrews ran the prototype simulation every day at noon in early April 2025. Each day, viewers guess which horse will win the day's race. The tweets generated buzz on X via fan art and viral discourse. Fandoms for each colored horse also grew with the game. For instance, many jokes were made about the cyan horse never winning a race. Others posted about the orange horse named Jovial Merryment winning multiple races.

History

On April 1st, 2025, X^[1] user @snakesandrews tweeted, "New prototype," showing a video game of colored horse icons bouncing around in a maze. The tweet received over 740 likes in eight days (shown below).

On April 2nd, X^[2] user @snakesandrews shared another video, called "Test race 2," showing the same prototype but with more features, like sound effects for the horses hitting the walls and an ending animation showing the color of the horse that won. In a week, the tweet received over 4,400 likes (shown below).

On April 3rd, 2025, X^[3] user @snakesandrews shared "Test race 3," gaining over 6,100 likes in six days. The user continued uploading race recordings at 12 p.m. on every following day. For instance, on April 6th, 2025, X^[4] user @snakesandrews shared parts 1 and 2 of "Test horse race 6," gaining over 1.8 million views and 21,000 likes in three days (shown below).

Fandom

In early April 2025, viral tweets and memes about the Horse Racing Tests surfaced en masse.

For instance, on April 3rd, X^[5] user @johnnys74231614 shared one of the first memes about the game, showing the orange horse with a hat, writing, "Gave my chud son a hat because I love him," gaining over 250 likes in six days (shown below).

On April 4th, X^[6] user @wizardzzpellz shared fan art of the blue horse, captioned, "Place your bets," receiving over 1,100 likes in five days (shown below).

On April 6th, 2025, X^[7] user @F1l_ters tweeted, "A leisurely day off after the race," attaching fan art of all the horses resting in a yard, gaining over 12,000 likes in three days (shown below).

On April 7th, X^[8] user @PetrichorCrown tweeted fan art of the cyan horse with text reading, "I bet on losing dogs," amassing over 11,000 likes in two days (shown below).

On Google Sheets,^[9] a stats page tracking each horse's performance is available.

Jovial Merryment

Jovial Merryment, is the name of a virtual orange horse competing in Horse Race Tests, a virtual horse racing competition run by the X / Twitter account @snakesandrews. The horse with the most wins across all races as of mid-April 2025, Jovial Merryment, spawned both humorous fandom and anti-fandom online and has inspired memes, fan art, GOAT montages and fancams.\

White and Cyan Yuri

Due to both White (Superstitional Realism) and Cyan horses being unable to win a race for a long period of time, the two horses became a subject of a yuri ship, with users drawing yuri artworks depicting the horses as humans, often as anime girls.

On April 19th, 2025, the two horses faced each other in a one-versus-one race, with White winning and its name being revealed.^[10] The development was followed by multiple users submitting doomed yuri artworks of the couple.

For example, on that day, artist and X user @mewdokas posted a fan art that garnered over 1,400 reposts and 6,900 likes on X^[11] in six days (shown below).

Orange and Yellow Yuri

On April 20th, 2025, in race e1m3t4,^[12] Orange and Yellow horses got stuck in a cranny together for a period of approximately 10 seconds, bumping into each other multiple times during that period, with Orange then proceeding to win the race. The occurrence inspired multiple yuri artworks and memes featuring the duo in the following days (example by @FrameDodge^[13] shown below).

PETA

On April 24th, 2025, the official X^[14][15] account for animal rights organization PETA posted two AI-generated artworks based on the White and Cyan ship, which advocated against horse racing (first artwork shown below). The posts garnered over 5.1 million views, 1,500 reposts and 1,700 likes, and over 1.2 million views, 980 reposts and 620 likes in one day, respectively.

In the following hours, the posts went viral on X^[16] as users criticized PETA over using AI to create the images and imposing its presence on the HRT fandom.

On April 24th, Horse Race Tests creator @snakesandrews quoted one of the posts by @PETA, writing, "Who's the illustrator @peta?" The post (shown below) garnered over 4,000 reposts and 138,000 likes on X^[17] in one day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References