Depending on how you count birthdays, video games as a medium are probably younger than your grandparents, and people like Shirly "Skyrim Grandma" Curry have proven just how much gamers love seeing folks from older generations enjoying their favorite hobby. The same appeal applies to Japanese YouTuber Matchan, a veteran of horse racing who's gaining global fame thanks to his videos on Umamusume: Pretty Derby.
Matchan's YouTube channel is largely a pretty unassuming vlog with most videos sitting at a few hundred views. But there's one big exception: a video with 4.5 million views titled "[umamusume] Can an old man with 40 years of horse racing experience guess the horses' names?" Presented with a series of printed images of the Umamusume cast, Matchan tries to guess their real-life race horse counterparts.
He doesn't get every one right, but makes enough successful connections – spurred on by some vague hints by the video's off-screen host – to make clear that the guessing game is winnable. His knowledge of real-life horse racing is impressive enough to me, somebody who once had to Google whether "Seabiscuit" was a real horse, and it's endearing seeing him lean into the anime world with such enthusiasm.
"This game is at a high level," Matchan remarks after learning of its depictions of Gold Ship and Rice Shower, according to the video's subtitles. "I think people who aren't interested in horse racing might not understand it."
That video was uploaded back in 2021, a few months after the Umamusume game launched in Japan. But the game's more recent global launch, as noted by Automaton West, has brought Matchan's guessing game to a worldwide audience.
"Hello, everybody, how do you do? My name is Matchan," he says in a new video in admirable English. Switching back to Japanese, he explains that "when I looked at the comments section, there were quite a lot of comments from foreigners, so I thought that it would be bad if I couldn't at least speak broken English to respond to them."
Through the remainder of this new video, Matchan again matches race horses with horse girls, because the pace of new characters in a gacha game simply does not slow down. And hey, if you've got a winning gimmick, why give it up?
