I know HN prefers to remove superlatives from headlines, but this isn’t “The official skifree home page”.<p>It’s the “The Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page”
I swear when I was like 7 and playing this, I managed to beat the snow monster by skiing off a ramp right when the monster appeared, so that I was in the air when he tried to gobble me, which -- to my utter astonishment -- seemed to kill them.<p>Maybe it was just a dream or something, because to my knowledge no one has ever claimed to be able to get past the skifree snow monster. I expected it to pop up over the years at least once. But after almost three decades, it seems increasingly likely that I just have this weird random childhood memory that did not happen, instead of being the one child in the whole world to actually slip by the snow monster (and mention how).<p>I assume that if it was even possible to kill the snow monster, someone would've disassembled the code by now and figured it out. But I can't help but wonder.
Damn, 100 shares of MSFT from 1991 would be worth about $1.7 million today. Not bad if they hung on to them!<p><a href="https://microsoft.gcs-web.com/investment-calculator?4b5195df-c641-42f0-a2e3-1d3e9e05ef02%5Bdate_month%5D=06&4b5195df-c641-42f0-a2e3-1d3e9e05ef02%5Bdate_day%5D=13&4b5195df-c641-42f0-a2e3-1d3e9e05ef02%5Bdate_year%5D=1991&4b5195df-c641-42f0-a2e3-1d3e9e05ef02%5Bnumber_invested%5D=100&4b5195df-c641-42f0-a2e3-1d3e9e05ef02%5Binvestment_type%5D=shares&url=" rel="nofollow">https://microsoft.gcs-web.com/investment-calculator?4b5195df...</a>
From the older version of the Wikipedia article that Chris links to:<p>> Mushrooms<p>> One lesser known aspect of the game deals with the numerous tree stumps found around the slopes of SkiFree. Users have found that when skied over backwards they transform into a small spotty mushroom. It has been theorised that this points to a philosophical leaning in the nature of SkiFree's creator Chris Pirih. The mushrooms may illustrate an extrapolation of Plato's theory of ideas in which the physical form of something may not reveal its true identity and only its representation in our particular plane of existence.<p>Gotta love Wikipedia's CITATION NEEDED culture!
in 7th grade technology class my lab partner and I found that if you situate yourself behind the ski lift and press up as to remain behind it, it increases your score by large amounts. I don't know how long it was until that middle school got new computers but I can guarantee that we held the high scores on every computer in that classroom until they did. I'd like to hope that somebody picked up one of those computers at a public auction, loaded up ski free out of boredom, and was absolutely blown away at the high score they would never ever come close to beating
I love some of those early 16 bit windows games like ski free, solitaire, and all the boatloads of shareware games of the era. They played like the simplicity of Atari 2600 games, but had crisp clipart style graphics. Castle of the Winds was a rogue clone of the era that I remember sinking a ton of time into playing.
I'm not familiar with SkiFree but I do remember spending A LOT of time with Deluxe Ski Jump 2[1].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.mediamond.fi/dsj2/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mediamond.fi/dsj2/</a>
SkiFree in the Browser<p><a href="https://basicallydan.github.io/skifree.js/" rel="nofollow">https://basicallydan.github.io/skifree.js/</a><p>2013 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5247965" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5247965</a>
I remember playing a similar game to this around that time period (late 80s, early 90s), but it was for DOS and came with its C source code. I remember having more fun with the source code than the actual game.