In 1991, Chris Pirih made a little skiing game to develop his Windows programming skills and playtested it at work. His employer, Microsoft, liked it so much that they acquired the right to include it in Microsoft Entertainment Pack. Chris Pirih retained his rights to the game and, one way or another, a copy of this simple little game made its way onto computers around the world. There are three modes of play: Slalom, Free-style, and Tree Slalom, or you can just ski wherever you want. Slalom is a 540m race to the finish line, and you have to ski around the flags. Tree Slalom is a 1040m version of Slalom, but with lots of trees to avoid. Free-style is an untimed 1040m course that requires you to get style points for hitting jumps and doing aerial tricks. The skier can be controlled with the keyboard or mouse, and can spin horizontally with the left and right arrow keys, or head over heels with the up and down arrow keys or the left mouse button. Style points are lost for crashing. The game is remembered for its many Easter eggs and extras, such as dogs, snowboarders and other skiers on the hill, walking trees, and an Abominable Snow Monster. Chris lost the source code to the game in 1993 and development stopped, until he rediscovered the source for v1.03 in 2005 and compiled it into a Win32 version of the game. Version 1.04 followed, restoring wraparound at the left and right edges of the hill.
Added by DOSGuy
Screenshots
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Downloads
| SkiFree v1.04 Freeware (39409 bytes) | 2 October 2005 | Win9x | |
| SkiFree v1.03 Freeware (Still searching) | 4 April 2005 | Win9x | |
| SkiFree v1.0 Freeware (29931 bytes) | xxxx | Win16 | Play online  |
| SkiFree v0.2.7 Freeware (47023 bytes) | xxxx | Win16 |
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Availability
SkiFree was originally released under a freeware license.