SkiFree (Released in 1991)

[Ink]

Brings back memories.

SkiFree - (Wikipedia)

History >> http://ski.ihoc.net/#history

I wrote SkiFree in C on my home computer, entirely for my own education and entertainment. One day while I was playing with it at work, the program manager for Windows Entertainment Pack happened to look over my shoulder and immediately decided he had to have this game. I called it WinSki, but the Microsoft marketroids hated that and decided, for inscrutible marketroidal reasons, to call it SkiFree. After some token resistance I let them have their way. Since the program was not originally a Microsoft product, Microsoft licensed it from me and paid me some trivial one-time fee (something like 100 shares of MSFT stock, no royalties) for its use.

(...)

In 1993 I started working on Version 2 of SkiFree, which would have slightly more realistic physics, multi-player, network play, robot opponents, and sounds. I got about half of those things done (split screen/keyboard multiplayer, very crude robots, and sound), but managed to get the physics completely screwed up to the point where it was no longer playable. At about the same time I also lost the original source code and got distracted by other projects, so SkiFree sort of went into permanent stasis at version 1.0.

In April 2005 I found the source code for SkiFree 1.03 and compiled it, so now we have a real 32-bit version that should run on any Windows XP system, even the new 64-bit XP. It also is more CPU-friendly (uses 1% of the CPU instead of 100%) so it won't drain your notebook battery. There are a few other changes from 1.0 -- see if you can spot them!

In October 2005 I fixed a few bugs and released version 1.04. (Some of the bitmap colors were wrong, and ski slope didn't "wrap around" like in 1.0.)

Download >> http://ski.ihoc.net/#download

 

[McLovin]

Never even heard of the game. It's multi-player which is a cool thing.

 

[HeffeD]

Yes, I remember SkiFree.

It wasn't the first skiing game that I remember, although it was probably the first one I remember with anything you could consider to be real graphics. Many of the earlier games were just using ASCII characters scrolling down the screen instead of actual graphics. They've been around I think as long as the personal computer has. The first one I remember was just called "Downhill".

I even wrote an ASCII game like this in High School. Several years before SkiFree was released.