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In I was working at Microsoft as a programmer, writing programming utilities for use by other programmers, such as a dialog editor used in the development of Word and Excel. Deciding it was time to learn Windows programming Windows 3.
The program was written in Fortran , and used a combination of VT escape sequences and ordinary text scrolling to achieve its animation. I made several text-terminal video games like this in college at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington and they were fairly popular among the computer nerds.
I remember very little of the Activision game, but I think it looked pretty much like SkiFree. 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 shares of MSFT stock, no royalties for its use. Such computers were not very powerful, nothing like modern PCs that can do 3-D rendering at millions of textured polygons per second No, in those days there wasn't even any such thing as a "video accelerator" -- the VGA was just a dumb pixel buffer hanging off the excruciatingly slow ISA bus.
This made it pretty challenging to get good performance out of even simple sprite-oriented animation! Windows didn't help matters any by introducing several layers of abstraction between the program and the video hardware Nowadays one would probably just render the sprites back-to-front in a memory buffer and blt the entire window on each frame.
In I started working on Version 2 of SkiFree, which would have slightly more realistic physics, multi-player, network play, robot opponents, and sounds. 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.
In April I found the source code for SkiFree 1. There are a few other changes from 1. In October I fixed a few bugs and released version 1. Some of the bitmap colors were wrong, and ski slope didn't "wrap around" like in 1. This is the voice of the Abominable Snow Monster. This is what he sounds like at dinner. This is where baby snow monsters come from: Here is the crappy Windows icon I made: Here is the nice icon that some graphic artist at Microsoft made: This Google search actually returns a lot of pages about SkiFree now, and not so many promotional "buy one lift pass get one free" adverts any more.
Most of them are warez download sites and "cheat code" lists, but there are a few gems like this SkiFree clone for the TI 92 calculator!! There's an amazingly long article on Everything2 and a Wikipedia entry though some of the more philosophical passages have been deleted. There's even a SkiFree Fan Fiction site! I've received plenty of fan mail over the years, but this one is my favorite.
I even got a fan message on my answering machine! Sorry about the lousy sound quality. Here's my best guess at what he's saying.
Let me know if I got it wrong. On February 10, , fragments of the lost diaries of my cousin SigFried were discovered in a curio shop in Istanbul. SigFried went missing sometime in while doing field research for SkiFree. We still haven't found SigFried himself, but now we have some further clues about what happened to him This is the latest version 1. For historical interest, you could download the original bit SkiFree 1.
It does work on most bit Windows systems, but not very well. If you can't get it to work in Windows XP, try this: Configure Windows XP to run bit Windows programs. That has fixed the problem for a few people so far. Most likely you want to get the latest bit version instead.
If you feel like blowing some money today, why not buy a T-shirt? Got something to say? Talk to the Cheese!