Anyone whose first PC came with a copy of Windows 3.1 should probably be familiar with SkiFree. The game was written in C all the way back in 1991 by Chris Pirih, a Microsoft employee, in his spare time. It was promptly snapped up by a program manager for the Windows Entertainment Pack, a collection of simple games for Windows 3.1 which included SkiFree, the excellent Chip’s Challenge, and a lot of card games, some of which have survived in Windows to this day.

The Game has 3 different modes (although in reality, gameplay doesn’t really vary between them all that much):

• “Freestyle” -  scored based on “style” by doing jumps and backflips.
• “Slalom” – a slalom run.
• “Tree Slalom” – as above, but with trees dotted about the course.

Steering is done with the mouse or the numeric keypad, and all courses end abruptly when the player is eaten by an abominable snow monster, although more recently players have worked out how to escape his evil clutches. Unfortunately the player isn’t rewarded with anything exciting for their efforts – the course just loops again from the start.

Somewhat surprisingly for a fast-moving graphical game it does supposedly run smoothly on a 286. It’s even been ported to the Mac and the Game Boy Color – and you can try it out for yourself on a modern PC, as the original author rediscovered the source code in 2005 and has compiled a 32-bit version that runs on modern operating systems. You can download that here.

…Or you could just check out the huge amount of bizarre fan fiction out there inspired by the game.

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