Tsuyoshi Kaneda, a former producer on the Derby Stallion series, has recently given an interview to Game*Spark, in which he expressed his amazement at Cygames' mobile hit Umamusume: Pretty Derby for its use of real horse names (h/t: Automaton West!).
Derby Stallion, in case you're unaware, is a horse racing/business sim from ASCII that debuted on the Nintendo Famicom in 1991, decades before Cygames launched the mobile hit, and became one of the pioneers of the racing horse genre. It went on to become a major franchise for ASCII, spanning many sequels, but according to Kaneda-san, it often struggled to get the rights to use real-life horse names in its games.
From the start, it always included real names for the stallions, but for a while, the series had to use pseudonyms for the rest of the horses — something the team wasn't particularly satisfied with.
"I remember the [Derby Stallion series creator Hiroyuki Sonobe] wanted to have the real names of the horses, if possible," said Kaneda-san. "But even in the case of the BestPlay Baseball series, we went through quite some trouble trying to implement real names of actual players (laughs)."
As he explained, ASCII had initially approached the JRA (the Japanese Racing Association) to use the names of real horses, which it accepted. However, the developer still needed to get permission from the horse's owners, which often proved tricky. This is because some of the owners didn't like the idea of having their horses evaluated in-game with stats, while in other situations, there were additional third parties that held the trademark rights to the name.
“When it came to names of racehorses in particular, actual jockeys who were playing Derby Stallion at the time put out a good word for us," said Kaneda. "They said it would be ‘beneficial for the industry.’ So, we continued our negotiations, but I remember it was extremely tough, because we even had cases where parties other than horse owners held trademark rights.”
It wouldn't be until five years after the initial Famicom entry, in Derby Stallion ’96 for the Super Famicom's Satellaview add-on, that the series would start using both real horse and jockey names. Because of all this, Kaneda-san states that he was astonished when Umamusume: Pretty Derby came out using real names right from the start, knowing how difficult it must be to have gotten the individual parties to agree to lend their rights to the project.
"Personally, I was amazed that they actually managed to pull it off from the start. It’s already difficult enough to have the horses simply appear as they are, but they went as far as to turn them into girls, so I’m certain they had to go through all kinds of trouble to achieve that. But I have so much admiration for the fact that they were able to carry it out and are currently thriving."