It is already a little while ago I went skiing, which reminded me of the great windows game called SkiFree. Noted on my to-do list after getting back from skiing, I finally found some time to write about this simple but brilliant game.

In 1991 Chris Pirih, programmer for Microsoft in those days, developed a remake of the pretty old Ski game for the VAX/VMS. The nice part is that this game didn’t require any heavy computer configurations, like in my days I played it on my 25 Mhz pc! So what is this game all about?
Core Gameplay
The game itself is very simple: ski down the hill and avoid any obstacles. Playing as the little ski-guy, you ski downhill and pass alot of obstacles: trees, stones, bumpy snow, rainbow colored jumping pads, amateur skiers, pro snowboarders but also peeing dogs. And offcourse when you are down-hill enough, you will find yourself eaten by the great Abominable Snow Monster!
The controls are very simple but gives you alot of freedom. You use the numpad keys to move in any direction. This means you can also climb back up the hill, in case you missed a bypassing jumping pad for example. It is also playable with the arrow-keys or mouse but preferable is still the numpad for the best skiing moves!
Starting up the hill you can choose between three courses: Free-style, Slalom or the more difficult Tree Slalom. Personally the most played way was not taking any of the courses, just ski free and have some fun! Well then, what made this game so fun?
Free roaming
In the game you ski in a random generated open world. You have no boundaries of where to go (except of getting to low down the hill) and what to do: making high airs with jumppads, crash into trees or jump over them to set them on fire, doing slaloms and do some stunts while being in the air to get some points! The good part of this free roaming aspect is that it gives you the illusion you still missed alot of spots in the game which automatically motivates you to play it again and again. But in the end you will never get back to the place you just missed, because its all randomly generated offcourse!
Let me play it now!
If you want to play the game for your own, you are lucky, because you can still play it on your Windows machine! Visit the website of Chris Pirih or download the game directly here (38,5kb zip-file).