Victory Furlong

The story

Victory Furlong (ネットセレクト競馬 ビクトリーハロン) was the horse-racing game in Sammy's Net Select series, on a touchscreen cabinet. You raised horses, from breeding through training, and raced them. A separate challenge mode let you race existing horses; hitting a four-week G1 target there could unlock a new breeding parent.

The game went through three rounds of location tests:

• 19–23 November 2004, a development test at GiGO Shibuya, Sammy's Regno Kawagoe and Ikebukuro GiGO. A test card held your stable name, racing silks, rank and up to eight horses.
• 17–26 December 2004 at Sammy's Regno Kawagoe, Silk Hat Keikyu Kawasaki and Club Sega Shibuya. Test cards cost ¥100 and became unlimited-use on 22 December.
• 14–23 January 2005, at more arcades, from Play City Carrot Sugamo to U Factory in Anjo.

Test cards couldn't be transferred or used to join AW-NET; you logged in to see the test rankings with the code on the back of the card. Arcadia dates the full release to 24 March 2005.

Your stable

The card held your stable details and the horse you last chose. The rest of your horses lived on the server, so playing offline meant you couldn't reach them, or enter network races.

Racing online

Victory Furlong had two kinds of network race:

• Net Stakes: one player set up a race with its own name, distance and entry rules, and could add a password to keep it to friends or an arcade tournament. Arcadia's May 2005 article says races took up to ten horses.
• Network tournaments: organised races you entered with a saved horse. After entries closed, you watched the result as a replay.

A fan's report from Isesaki Namco Land on 28 March 2005 describes racing live against players nationwide on four stations.

Some ranks could only be reached by winning network races.

Member services

The website gave members stable and horse records, a stable diary, a search for rival stables, rankings down to 100th place for racehorses, the item shop and a breeding simulator: pick a stallion and a mare and see what kind of foal to expect, with more precise forecasts costing more points.

On the phone, a daily race lottery let you predict a winner for in-game items, with no losing tickets. Anything you bought or won reached your stable the next time you played on an online cabinet.

Daily maintenance ran from 04:00 to 06:00.

Points

10 points for starting or continuing a game, plus 10 for winning a race on that credit.