Coding Horror: The Story of SkiFree

Over at Coding Horror they have the story of SkiFree, which anyone who owned a copy of Windows 3.x will remember as being a highlight of one of the several Windows Entertainment Packs that usually came with your computer.

Once you got bored with the solitaire variants and got stuck somewhere around level 78 on Chip's Challenge, there was SkiFree, a fun little skiing sim with intuitive controls, no big words, and an abominable snowman waiting for you at the bottom of the hill. The track was of fixed distance so you could easily play through a few games without losing a whole afternoon.

And of course, develop a deep-seated, irrational hatred of that abominable snowman. What was that thing? A yeti? Bigfoot? Star Jones?

Update: If I'm ever interviewed and asked what my greatest accomplishment has been, it will now be that one time in high school I was playing SkiFree and just as I reached the monster-gets-to-eat-you point in the game, I hit a rainbow ramp and used it to pick up some serious air. It added like an extra one hundred and sixty yards of powder onto my total distance before he caught and devoured me whole. Good times.