Several notes about
HORSE the
game, in addition to what
/dev/joe pointed out.
Horse is about making a better shot yes, but it is also about 60 %
mental. Whether or not you are a better player,
talking trash and making wildly
better shots is really the
key to winning. Making the other player mess up is just as
good as making the good
shots, as long as it's just in
good clean fun.
Horse is also a
two-player trick mode in
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2. You each take turns trying to
perform better tricks starting from the same
location in a stage. You try to
1-up each other, until a person messes up or scores less than the previous player. That person gets a
letter and the match continues on. A player loses when one person spells
HORSE, just as in the
basketball game.
The game of Horse was best embodied in a set of very famous
McDonalds commercials, where
Larry Jordan and
Michael Bird play each other in
Horse. It ran as a running
commercial gag for a while before it was taken off the air. The official name of the
commercial is "
Showdown". The only rules were set forth was by
Larry Bird and was (memorably) "no dunking!" (Bird could never really
dunk).
The two would
interchange shots, and were so perfectly matched, the shots moved to quite
incredible things. It started out on the
floor, moved over to the
rafters (Bird: "Off the floor, off the
scoreboard, off the backboard, no
rim"
*), and then in the second spot, it had moved outside (
Jordan: "Off the expressway, over the river, off the
billboard, through the window, off the wall, nothing but
net.", *
swish* sound here).
It was a quite sucessful
commercial spot and ran throughout 1993, airing at the
Super Bowl, and continuing afterwards. McDonalds got quite a good value with their money by playing off the highly publicized friendly
rivarly between the two, and it has stuck in the mind of all who have seen it.
* Quotes taken from a Google cache of an expired web page