SkiFree

Sometime in 1991, I first saw a skier racing down the monitor and then getting eaten by a snow monster. I had no idea what I'd just witnessed. SkiFree was just a small side project by one Microsoft programmer.

Chris Pirih wrote this game in his spare time while working at Microsoft. The game eventually ended up in the Microsoft Entertainment Pack after Pirih ran it at work and the right person noticed it. That's what Microsoft was like back then — a company where management might approve shareware skiing instead of giving you the ax. SkiFree is a sports arcade game for Windows 3.x, not DOS, where you control a skier racing down an endless slope.

The game offers three modes: freestyle, slalom, and tree slalom. In freestyle you simply head downhill, rack up points for tricks, and dodge trees, dogs, and other obstacles. The mouse controls feel odd at first — you steer by moving the cursor — but after a few minutes it feels natural. The physics are understandably schematic, no realistic snow simulation. What made the game truly memorable was the yeti. After a certain distance, a snow monster emerges and devours you. No warning, no escape — well, almost. There is a way to get away, but plenty of players never discovered it, and this sudden death from nowhere was one of the most iconic microtraumas of nineties childhood.

SkiFree has aged exactly as you'd expect from such a game — like a charming miniature, not an hour-long experience. The graphics are charmingly modest, the sounds are... present. But it served its purpose perfectly: five minutes of break time, a snowy slope, then death by yeti. The game became a cultural reference far exceeding its actual content, mainly thanks to that yeti.

Today, those who remember it from the days when Windows didn't support 32-bit colors and you launched programs from File Manager will appreciate playing it in a browser. Or anyone who simply wants to spend ten minutes on a slope and verify whether there really is a way to escape the yeti. There is. But I won't tell you how.