There’s this one Barbie horse game that lingers in my head as a faint, wispy memory from childhood that I’ve been trying to fully recall for years. I did not own this game. I did, somehow, own a disc that contained a demo for this unknown Barbie game, either standalone or bundled with others. My recollection is that it allowed you to pick from a couple of different horses, name your chosen horse from a limited selection of Barbie horse-like names, brush and feed them, and then ride around a simple course in first-person. I was a foolish child who could not figure out how to make the horse jump, so I never completed the track. I just picked and named a horse, brushed it, and fed it over and over again.

I also had a demo disc of Barbie Super Sports (perhaps both were on the same demo disc?), a game I similarly liked a lot but, unlike the horse game, did eventually learn how to play. I was supposed to snowboard through gates and also run into snowmen on purpose and I think avoid sticks. There was a limited series of challenges I could try, which I eventually mastered entirely, but kept playing over and over again for the fun of it. There was also a little in-game store where you could buy (with fake in-game money, it was the ’90s) new clothes for Barbie, but you couldn’t afford any of them in the demo.

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