By Alec Meer on August 26th, 2009 at 5:26 pm.
Why? Why does he want to eat me? What did I ever do to him?
I’m just skiing, man. I’m not a threat to him or his people. I can’t believe I taste that great, underneath this garish windcheater and plastic boots. I’m certainly not going to replace all the calories he spends chasing me down a frozen mountain slope at about 90mph. He wants to eat me because he’s just a massive bastard. There’s no other possible explanation.
The Abominable Snow Monster always catches me. He always eats me. This is the world’s most dangerous sport – never mind the limb-breaking collisions with trees and rocks and flags and chairlifts and people. This is an activity that always, always ends with being devoured by a indefatigable monster. No-one in their right mind would ever attempt it.
Yet I’ve attempted it again and again. My life is a small price to pay for a high score. And maybe, just maybe I’ll somehow escape the clutches of the hairy, grey, man-eating horror this time. But enough about Kieron’s mum. I’m talking about early Microsoft’s finest gaming hour.
Skifree enjoys the kind of cutely legendary backstory that’s very rare in today’s harshly focus-grouped times. Mid-level programmer Chris Pirih created and played a tribute to Activision’s Skiing for the Atari 2600 in his spare time, until eventually the sparsely colourful snow-world on his screen was spotted by one of his managers. Soon afterwards, it found itself a part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack, alongside the likes of Tetris, FreeCell and LucasArts’ Pipe Dream. It’s an odd collection of games even to this day, but its aim at the time was to offer a collection of 16-bit games that worked exclusively in Windows 3.1 – very much a rarity in an age when most every game was designed for DOS. You may remember this icon:
Ah, 16-colour memories.
Oddly, I knew none of this until a few days ago, when Skifree randomly flickered across my forebrain for the first time in years and I had the fancy to read up about it. My experience of it was a copied floppy disk I owned at school. Most pupils in my school had a similar disc. It contained only Skifree, with no trace of its official Microsoftian status.
[We each had another floppy disc at time, containing a barely discernable series of looped, low-resolution black and white photo slideshows about a large-thighed lady named Mandy indulging in a series of explicit sexual adventures, but that’s another story.]
We each played it alone, the only way it could be played, and competed for high scores. High scores were achieved by using the game’s simple controls to pull off simple stunts in its simple engine. Points were lost by slamming into trees, people and whatnot. There were bragging rights to be had from besting that lunchbreak’s highest score so far, but mostly it was about watching each other slam face-first into obstacles and giggling.
Eventually, the high scores achieved by the fastest-fingered kids became insurmountable. That’s when the secondary challenge came in – avoid the Abominable Snow Monster for as long as possible.
It was achievable, for some of us at least. The game world appeared infinite, an endless expanse of white with bits in even after the stretch during which points could be earned had passed. It wasn’t. It looped, eventually and invisibly. If you stayed alive for long enough, you’d eventually reach the start point again, and safety anew.
A cursory check reveals someone’s inevitably done the exact maths to ascertain the point at which this happened, but frankly that diminishes the experience for me. The joy was this desperate, ski-bound flight for survival, pinging left and right to keep just a step ahead from this ceaseless egg-shaped horror, going on and on and on and on until suddenly, miraculously, the Monster was gone.
Except a few minutes later you’d be out of the safe bit again and the bastard would come right back. ‘Skifree’ ain’t the half of it. ‘Skiforever’ would be better. You never, ever stop skiing, not until you choose to quit, until you got eaten or until you got so tired you let yourself get eaten. Truly, this is a far more frightening sport than death race, bare knuckle boxing or bullfighting. It’s a sport you sign up for life. The rest of your life. Which will probably be extremely short.
There’s something strangely subversive about this inevitable defeat, this somehow celebratory futility. It’s not very Microsoft, a company now built upon laughably hollow You Can Do Anything! soundbytes. This was and is the great joy of it – skiing as nihilism. I love it for that. It’s a strange accident that somehow wound up presented before the eyes of the world.
Oh, and it’s also about as note-perfect as a reflex-based high score game gets, even now.
Chris Pirih hasn’t forgotten what’s surely his finest hour. A few years back, he dug up the original sourcecode and created an identical version that, unlike the original, plays nice with our modern Windowses. Get it from here, but do read his page about the game too.
I adored and still adore Skifree. It’s one of the Games That Made Me, and now I’ve revisited it I’m really not sure why it wasn’t on my original list.
I used to have nightmares about the Abominable Snow Monster. I’m worried that’s going to happen again.
26/08/2009 at 17:30 Gap Gen says:
I clicked on that link, and now I’ve seen snow monster gif porn. Thanks.
26/08/2009 at 17:37 robrob says:
That wolf thing scared the shit out of me too. Still does a bit.
26/08/2009 at 17:38 Wooly says:
I remember this game! Such good memories.
26/08/2009 at 17:40 wm says:
Skifree and MANDY! Dude, we have the same life.
26/08/2009 at 17:42 brulleks says:
“We each played it alone, the only way it could be played, and competed for high scores.”
Are you talking about Skifree or Mandy there?
26/08/2009 at 17:47 Dreamhacker says:
I have no idea how, when or where I first played this, but I have played this way back when. A short poll reveals almost every gamer I know have played this too, somehow.
26/08/2009 at 17:51 Kelron says:
YES!
26/08/2009 at 17:55 RLacey says:
Aw man… the memories.
That said, I’m still terrible at this game. I find the controls really fiddly.
26/08/2009 at 17:56 Riaktion says:
He’s right. I do remember playing this.
26/08/2009 at 18:05 Barky says:
Great game. I’ve never got past the Yeti, though.
26/08/2009 at 18:14 Naurgul says:
Wow, talk about nostalgia. I think I only managed to escape the monster once and then he got me on his next attack. I couldn’t even begin to imagine that you end up at the beginning of the game if you escape its grasp enough times!
26/08/2009 at 18:17 Nero says:
Oh, yes. I played this a whole lot back in the day. Damn Yeti >:|
26/08/2009 at 18:17 Mike says:
Yay an old game I can remember, I loved this when I was very young. My escape of the ‘monster’ happened only once and produced much happiness – 30 seconds later, I was eaten though…
26/08/2009 at 18:22 chesh says:
Holy crap, I haven’t thought about this for at least 15 years.
I was always rubbish at this.
26/08/2009 at 18:28 Chalkster says:
YESZ!
26/08/2009 at 18:31 somnolentsurfer says:
Wow. I had no idea the world looped. This was probably the most pirated game at my school, providing endless illicit entertainment as we attempted to stealthily run unlicensed executables in the computer rooms. This is all before they introduced e-mail on the network, of course, when messaging each other around the room with new-fangled technology became more fun. That and pasting each other’s heads on to Jennifer Aniston’s body in Paint Shop Pro.
26/08/2009 at 18:33 Anarki says:
Wow, i’m almost speechless with nostalgia. I used to play this at my grandmas house while the grown ups talked downstairs, over and over for hours I’d get eaten by that monster, I just assumed that was the end of the game and there was no way to get past it! I never did get past without being eaten. Hilarious stuff tho.
26/08/2009 at 18:34 faelnor says:
MAN THOSE FRIGGIN SNOWBOARDERS
26/08/2009 at 18:41 Frankie The Patrician[PF] says:
Oh man, this was one of my first Windows games… For me it was Ski Free (+others) and colour still GIFs with a pair of…well, close girlfriends having a nice Sunday afternoon in stockings..right after tea, I guess :)
26/08/2009 at 18:44 BooleanBob says:
Ski free! Man.
Lemmings, of course. Lemmings and Zak McCraken, on my neighbour’s bewildering, mind-expanding Commodore Amiga. Before I was six, when he was nine (which was impossibly old), watching him play from the edge of his bed, frightened, elated, not really understanding anything but excited beyond distraction. Then we would be Jedis on the way to school, cleaving the air with invisible lightsabers . I had no idea what a jedi was, but I didn’t care: the blurry Empire Strikes Back screenshots in his gaming mags confirmed them as gaming celebrities, superstars beyond reproach.
Later, Galaga, and Chucky Egg, and the ridiculously, intimidatingly difficult Dare Devil Dennis on the BBC Micro. Then, the somehow educationally permissible Mad Professor Mariarti on the school Acorn. But, but! In 1997, on an Escom Pentium 75, sparsely furnished though it was with software exclusively suffixed ’95′, was Ski Free.
Above and beyond all else, Ski Free.
<3
26/08/2009 at 18:48 Stuk says:
Wow, I remember this game so well. When I was much younger I used to play it all the time, trying to do the slalom and the other challenges.
But I was shit scared of that monster (I thought it was a robot at the time). Ahh, memories.
26/08/2009 at 18:57 Railick says:
For some reason this reminds me of another game I used to play on windows a lot where you were a space ship that was only a simple icon and you flew around this seemingly randomly generated galaxy attacking planets and other space ships with the weapons you’d purchased (and you could conquer the planets) I don’t remember what it was called but it was like an early version of Spore’s space mode, and probably a lot more fun ;P Ah, I love old games like these.
We used to play this in school as well.
26/08/2009 at 18:58 Wooly says:
That abominable snowman scared the shit outta me as a kid. YOU COULN’T ESCAPE!!
26/08/2009 at 19:00 Riotpoll says:
I was always rubbish at this game :(
26/08/2009 at 19:08 GJLARP says:
Wooo yeah one of my childhood games being featured here. Awesome!
26/08/2009 at 19:09 Kester says:
I remember the first time I got eaten by the yeti. It was amazingly subversive at the time, as well as being very, very funny. While we’re on the (admittedly small) genre of “sports games which involve being eaten by B-movie monsters”, who can forget 720 and the killer bees that attacked if you didn’t skateboard in an extreme enough fashion? It certainly isn’t a richly-mined enough seam: the next Pro Evo should have Godzilla turn up at the end and step on Cristiano Ronaldo.
26/08/2009 at 19:11 Ziv says:
I had a whole bunch of pirated games on my computer. I had such a big HDD (1GB!) that we just copied to E:\ partition all the HD of my uncle, which had dave, and the kid w/ he pogo stick, and the jumping spaceship and a package of 100 lame DOS games. but one of my favorites (along w/ dave and the jumping spaceship) is the ski game, I remember not competing for scores or time because I barely knew what I was doing, but learning to jump was so exhilarating that I can’t forget that moment. this was the time that I games the most I think in my life, when we got the win 98 machine I barely had games for it but when we got the “good” xp machine I learned to pirate (shhh don’t tell) and then my “real” gaming period began, the two most influential games I played on that machine were theme park world (a tycoon game that got me hooked up on strategy) and half life 2 which set the bar a bit too high on storytelling for others to follow :\ which made future games less fun if they didn’t have good mechanics and dynamics or a good story (psychonauts is also one of my favorite games of all time thanks to the lovely story and character design).
not really connected but one more game that made me was crysis which redefined dynamics (the suit made the game always interesting) you REALLY could choose whether to sneak or rambo through enemies and most importantly it was one of the first games that I played on my good rig (radeon 4870) that made me realize that games CAN make you stand and watch the scenery in awe (till then I played on radeon 9250 and radeon 9600).
26/08/2009 at 19:21 drygear says:
I didn’t know it was possible to escape the abominable snowman. I did have a theory that you could melt him if you set a tree on fire and got him to run into it while he was chasing you, but I never managed to pull it off.
26/08/2009 at 19:28 dartt says:
Add me to the list of people terrified by that damn yeti.
26/08/2009 at 19:44 MacBeth says:
I’ve honestly never even heard of this game before, which is slightly mystifying as I am of about the right age (cf. the Chock-a-block reference in the podcast)
26/08/2009 at 19:45 DF7 says:
SkiFree is the best game in the world.
26/08/2009 at 20:00 paralel says:
Mum finally saved up, went out and bought us our first family PC only as far back as 1998. Beyond the clutches of the school computers at the time, we had unlimited access to word processors, paint, shit, even AOL internet. Still, siblings and I would come home each day and would stay in the room, curtains closed forever fleeing the monster.
I remembered all this and downloaded it again a couple of months ago, and I guess it would also slot nicely into a life-shaping game list of mine too. Ta.
26/08/2009 at 20:02 RJ-45 says:
you guys forgot the dog that always pees when you touch it
26/08/2009 at 20:31 viper34j says:
best…game…evar!
26/08/2009 at 20:36 Earl_of_Josh says:
I feel a little melancholy, I remember great times with Skifree as well, and the hours of playing it to exclusion really. Not because it was SO AWESOME it deserved the attention, more like it was the most interesting of a very limited set of games. I wonder in the future what sites like this are going to post about in their “retro” features? “Retro: Gears of War 2″? I also kind of wonder if there will be this same level of community feeling. Back then everyone in class had a copy of Skifree, now there are so many games, what is the Skifree of the current generation?? I weep for them, poor little bastards.
26/08/2009 at 20:44 Astrozombie says:
i can’t believe u posted about this :L
i have the yeti tatooed in my inner arm
the exact frame when he is swalowing with his head turned 90 degrees ^^
26/08/2009 at 21:01 DarkNoghri says:
Skifree? Wow. This is why I read RPS. Now just do a special on Scorched Earth. Actually, I just checked the link up above: you did mention Scorched Earth previously.
Faelnor: Oh yes, those snowboarders. GAH.
I remember getting past the Yeti sometimes. I also somehow came across the Skifree page recently (within the past two years). Good times.
By some freak chance of luck, I actually happen to have the original .exe file on my computer right now. Between backups of backups of upgrades and soforth, I have all three folders of apps from the Windows Entertainment Pack.
And Skifree actually runs. It does seem a touch jittery though. Maybe the new version would fix it.
26/08/2009 at 21:05 Thegrogster says:
I remember this back in grade 6 when our school was given a ton of junk computers. I managed to to ski for so long I had repeated the course enough times to have 8 of those monsters after me. I was going so fast a single jump took half the course. My proudest moment during that was when I landed one jump I slammed into a tree, but I had enough time to get my speed up and going again so I wouldn’t get eaten. Second time I nailed a tree I wasn’t so lucky. Second best gaming memory I have. :)
26/08/2009 at 21:07 Dave says:
Yeah drygear, you weren’t alone; the rumor that ran around the high school computer room was that he would melt if you could light a tree on fire at the exact right moment. Ahh, the days before Gamefaqs.
26/08/2009 at 21:17 CJohnson03 says:
you also get eaten if you go too far left, right, or uphill. I tried so many ways to avoid that damn monster…
26/08/2009 at 21:49 Chris Evans says:
I used to have that Microsoft Entertainment Pack, I bloody loved it! Chips Challenge (I think that was on there?) Pipe Dream and Ski Free were some of my favourites from it :D
I managed to avoid the yeti a few times, but never many. Would often play it with my sister and neighbours trying to get high scores and avoid that evil monster!
Anyone know if there is somewhere to download that Microsoft Entertainment Pack? I have it on floppy disc somewhere still, but alas no PC with a floppy disc drive! :(
26/08/2009 at 21:54 Maykael says:
Thank you for making me remember this wonderful little game from my childhood, Alec!
26/08/2009 at 22:06 fulis says:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43HeUISgMXA
26/08/2009 at 22:18 pimorte says:
For infinite freestyle score, go under a rock, stop, and hold up. :)
26/08/2009 at 22:38 MadTinkerer says:
Has anyone else successfully killed the yeti? I have. It’s NOT easy, but:
1) find the yeti. He will not attack if you stay above him.
2) Carefully staying above him, maneuver to a point past a campfire (if I’m remembering correctly).
3) Get the Yeti to charge straight towards you with the campfire in between.
4) Scream loud enough to seriously freak out your cat when the angle is just slightly wrong and the Yeti “misses” the fire.
5) Try it again a couple times, it’ll work.
6) Succeed.
7) Keep skiing down the slope unmolested by the now VERY DEAD yeti. The level will wrap around and you can to the entire course again.
8) HOLY CRAP the Yeti regenerates if you get to the bottom again.
9) Carefully try to trick it into the fire again.
10) Repeat until it eats you (very likely) or you hit some kind of limit on how many times the program will wrap the level (very unlikely).
26/08/2009 at 22:56 RagingLion says:
Oh wow, you’ve taken me back right there, I didn’t play a lot of games as a kid but there was indeed a copy of Skifree on our first family computer – a 486 Windows 3.1 machine.
That monster did indeed scare the whatever out of me, especially the first time I got that far. It was the way it moved freakishly fast that got me. I was never good enough to find out you could loop right round to the beginning again.
26/08/2009 at 23:05 Kommissar Nicko says:
Helas…
My only memories of this are actually playing a demo of it at Best Buy or something. I remember being entranced, as I was with most games when I was in grade school.
26/08/2009 at 23:47 Markoff Chaney says:
This was a rather enjoyable game on our 386DX with 3.11. 16 colors wasn’t the best she could pump out (256 baby, YEAH! Take that CGA!) but it wasn’t too shabby either. I much preferred Chip’s Challenge, I’ve never been the best twitch gamer, but this was pretty fun, too. Thanks for the memories and love the link to the dev’s remembrances as well.
26/08/2009 at 23:51 The Colonel says:
Pulling off the burning tree trick had me occupied for days. Does anyone know if it actually did work? Did anyone ever play the Dare2Dream adventure games for 3.1? I miss being able to jump into and out of DOS.
27/08/2009 at 00:07 DarkNoghri says:
@Chris Evans
Oh yes. As I recall, Chips Challenge was more of a family event. One person would complete a few levels and get off the computer. Someone else would come by later and go a few further. I don’t know that we ever beat it.
Pipe Dream, oh how we loved thee. It was a great game. My favorite memory of the 1/4 of Bioshock that I actually got through was that certain puzzles were Pipe Dream matches.
Also, Jezzball, Rodents’ Revenge, Rattler Race (oh how competitive we were), and so much more.
27/08/2009 at 00:47 Chris Evans says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_Microsoft_Entertainment_Pack
That was the one I had, if I remember correctly I got that pack free with a mouse. With that mouse I also had the pack with the first list of games from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Arcade
27/08/2009 at 02:06 MarvintheParanoidAndroid says:
Oh wow, I have such great memories of playing this and Pipe Dream on the first computer we had. After getting over my terror of that bastard yeti, I think I managed to dodge him once or twice but I certainly never survived long enough for the world to loop.
27/08/2009 at 02:54 Hybrid says:
Hey! I copied Skifree from school to!
27/08/2009 at 04:54 malkav11 says:
I could swear someone made this game or something very, very much like it for Macintosh as a freeware endeavour. I don’t think I would have played it on Windows, as I never really spent any time in Windows 3.1 – my experience of that OS was that I was better off in straight DOS for running most any game.
27/08/2009 at 08:25 mashakos says:
this game was a total fail, like most of windows gaming circa 1990-1993.
“let’s play slow games with the keyboard, beeps for sound and 4 colour gfx! Yay!”
27/08/2009 at 09:23 Jayt says:
Used to love this game. Never knew it looped, I guess I never thought about it being finite in anyway.
27/08/2009 at 10:19 Mike says:
Oh god. I love this game so hard.
27/08/2009 at 10:48 Andy says:
I’m rather jealous of all the people who played this at school. I was the right age, about 11, when I played it on my grandmas Win 3.11 system, but at school all we had was Acorns. Anyone remember them? No? Stupid stupid systems, no idea why my school insisted on using them as it taught us nothing about how to use computers in the real world which are obviously all Windows based.
27/08/2009 at 11:48 Clovis says:
I played this game a lot, totally alone. I don’t know anyone else who really played it. I would invent a roster of skiiers and stage a tournament based on points. Wow, I was one bored loser.
27/08/2009 at 12:00 Butler` says:
I had to look at the screenshot about three times in quick succession before I clicked “o m g I remember that!”
27/08/2009 at 12:08 Andrew Dunn says:
This game was incredible. I remember we got the Entertainment Pack thing for Windows 95, with our first PC. My mum got addicted to Freecell. I played Slay and Skifree.
So good. Definitely downloading this later.
27/08/2009 at 12:23 mrrobsa says:
SkiFree was fun, but I’ve always been a Pipemania guy. It felt more like destiny was in my hands.
27/08/2009 at 13:03 Motoko says:
My first PC game.
27/08/2009 at 14:51 aoanla says:
I dunno. I was busy playing better games on my Amiga when this came out. (I didn’t have a PC until 1998, and so I “missed out” on all these “gems”. Honestly, gentlemen, this looks like a C64 game!)
27/08/2009 at 15:21 Joseph says:
I loved this game. Good memories.
27/08/2009 at 15:22 Joseph says:
I loved this game. Good memories. Thanks for the link, going to play again now.
27/08/2009 at 15:32 Joseph says:
As a kid I always wondered why that thing would eat me too. I tried and I tried so many times to get further and find ways for it not to eat me. It always ate me.
I just played once in freestyle once in slalom. The yeti got me both times. Will have to try harder next time.
Sorry about the triple post.
27/08/2009 at 15:59 ascagnel says:
@The Colonel Dare2Dream was amazing for its time. I bet CliffyB would love to forget he made a kids adventure game (and Jazz Jackrabbit 2).
27/08/2009 at 19:03 someguy says:
I can’t find anything related to MANDY. If anyone has any info or links… SAUCE PLZ.
27/08/2009 at 19:49 Chris says:
Wow.
It’s good to know I somehow managed to warp so many personalities.
28/08/2009 at 04:56 Hank says:
Thank you for spurring long-forgotten memories of time spent playing skifree (and other games, but the sight of this one really made me pause and smile) as a kid in my grandpa’s basement. I of course had to make a copy and export it back to the northwoods.
29/08/2009 at 04:11 Thranx says:
hahahahhaha! What a classic.
29/08/2009 at 04:55 Berzee says:
Mmm, we had this on, I think, our first Windows computer. Brilliant ^_^
My brother has this game (and another great one, Rodent’s Revenge) available for download here.
29/08/2009 at 04:56 Berzee says:
(that’s the original exe that was included in Windows 3.1 — not some fancy new sissy-boy “upgrade” OR WUTEVER!!!)
29/08/2009 at 08:15 Andrew says:
While we’re on the subject of old school PC games, I remember my friend had this CD of a game where these huge balls would bounce back and forth across the screen, and you had to manoeuvre your character underneath them and fire a shot straight so that it will hit the balls and either destroy them or break them in half so there are more balls to destroy. Obviously, the goal was to clear the screen without being hit by one of the balls.
It’s been driving me insane for years now, trying to remember the name for googling purposes. I turn in desperation to the RPS readership.
29/08/2009 at 21:37 mihor_fego says:
@ Anrew
Could this be anything other than Pang? There’s 3 released, imported to most platforms of the day from the arcade…
30/08/2009 at 00:50 Colin Hansen says:
You’re talking about bubble trouble…
30/08/2009 at 07:02 Andrew says:
Yeah, it’s Bubble Trouble (though Pang is pretty similar), though that’s not what it was called on the CD. It probably had a bunch of clones with different names. Thanks, guys.
25/11/2009 at 08:03 Serena says:
See Video Skifree >> http://www.itohyes.com/skifree-game/