Ancient Web: SkiFree’s Author Explained Where the Snow Monster Came From

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

For generations of Windows users, SkiFree's most memorable skiing lesson was that a giant snow monster will eat you. The game's creator left a homepage explaining how that surprisingly enduring nightmare happened.

Visit the Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page.

The author remembers being a Microsoft programmer in 1991, working mostly in C on OS/2 development tools. To teach himself the new Windows 3.0 programming environment, he rewrote a skiing game he had made for VAX/VMS text terminals. On the original machine the skier was represented by a couple of slashes and the trees by caret symbols.

He even reproduces a miniature terminal screenshot and links the old Fortran program. The page says the terminal game had itself been inspired by an Activision skiing game on the Atari 2600. It is an unusually direct account of how game ideas migrate between machines.

A hobby project was spotted over a shoulder

The programmer says a Windows Entertainment Pack manager saw him playing his own Windows version at work and wanted it included. The homebrew game was called WinSki; Microsoft renamed it SkiFree. He recalls licensing it to the company for a modest one-time payment rather than royalties.

His technical explanation is the jewel. A 386 with VGA graphics had little bandwidth to spare, so he spent substantial effort minimizing the areas of the screen that needed to be redrawn. Overlapping sprites and erasures were preprocessed to produce smooth movement on hardware that modern game engines would regard as a polite insult.

A 1993 attempt at SkiFree 2 added partial support for split-screen multiplayer, computer opponents, and sound. The author says he never got the new physics working satisfactorily, lost the original source, and turned to other projects.

Then the story takes an unusual preservation turn. In April 2005 he found source for version 1.03 and made a 32-bit build. The page also describes later builds and a careful attempt to respond to antivirus warnings by recompiling from original development tools. Those executable links are historical downloads, not a guarantee they will run safely on a present-day machine.

The page collects monster sound clips, fan correspondence, links to a TI-92 calculator clone, and even fake lost diaries from the monster's family. The technical memoir and the jokes share one homepage.

Read the creator's history and surviving download notes.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.