Official SkiFree Home Page | Hacker News Reader

Official SkiFree Home Page

ski.ihoc.net

185 pointsgenerichuman32 comments

I know HN prefers to remove superlatives from headlines, but this isn’t “The official skifree home page”.

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.

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).

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.

Nah... When you managed to go past one monster... Not only would it still run after you but another one would appear and join him if I remember well.

So there is a way to get past them?

That's the thing though, I killed them, rather than getting past them. So they couldn't chase after me.

Or it was just a skifree fever dream.

But I'm curious how to get past that damned devil. Is there any info anywhere?

From memory, the only thing you can really do is taking the trampolines to flee.

And also jump by using one of the mouse buttons especially using the little snow hills, that will propel you forward.

Hmm. So there's at least two ways to jump? Interesting.

Maybe it's not so unlikely that no one ever tried jumping onto the snow monster via all available methods.

I think it was the ski ramp that was able to kill them.

Does anyone have a Windows box handy? If so, does the .exe still run on modern Windows? (https://ski.ihoc.net/ski32.zip)

Whoa, apparently the author recently recompiled the SkiFree exe with VS2019. So, they have access to the source code, and there's a modern version available...

... Welp. This sounds like the beginning of a new quest to unveil a childhood SkiFree mystery. I wonder if I can bribe them to quietly let me rifle through the source code looking for the snow monster logic.

Doesn't it seem kind of out of place that there wasn't any way to kill the snow monsters? Betcha there's at least one. And jumping is the only available mechanic, other than tricking it into running into a tree, Tasmanian-devil style.

Yep. Jumps are faster than skiing, and with big ones you can outrun them, at least until you screw up.

https://xkcd.com/667/

Press 'F' to pay respects.

Damn, 100 shares of MSFT from 1991 would be worth about $1.7 million today. Not bad if they hung on to them!

https://microsoft.gcs-web.com/investment-calculator?4b5195df...

MSFT is off its peak from the beginning of the year; if you sold at 315.95, that's more like $2.3 million.

Always the benefit of hindsight.

I make it 5x 2-4-1 splits since 1993, so 100 shares then would be worth 3200 shares today, and I think were about $80 each at the time.

700 hours of average paid work ($11/hr) back in 1993 would have bought you 100 Microsoft Shares, which today would be worth $750k, or $1,000 an hour.

On the other hand you could have bought 700 hours worth of Blockbuster shares.

According to the calculator above, it turns into 7200 shares today, but otherwise, yes, you are right.

Most of the value gained was from all these stock splits. I wonder why MSFT hasn’t had one in 20 years?

https://getsplithistory.com/MSFT

Splits don't change the value of the stock. If there's a 2:1 split, the market cap stays the same so the share price halves. It's just a way lower the price of individual shares.

Why do it at all then? I've always wondered.

Before fractional shares were a thing, it made the stock more attainable for "regular" investors. It can also change up your ranking in indices like the Dow Jones that are price weighted

It used to be difficult to transact in orders of less than 100 shares. There's still a bias against 'odd lots', at exchanges, but market makers love small orders because they tend to be retail orders and it's better to trade with retail than institutions generally.

Trading under $10 is discouraged by the exchanges. Trading above $100 is discouraged because 100x $100 is $10,000, which is a lot of money. Targetting about $25 was the norm.

Single lot sales and now fractional sales makes a lot of that less necessary, and so more companies have avoided doing it.

But there used to be 'low priced stock funds' which would buy stocks around $10 and sell them around $25 and do pretty well.

From the older version of the Wikipedia article that Chris links to:

> Mushrooms

> 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.

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 remember castle of the winds. That was exactly a RPG with the Windows 3 vibe. Most gaming was still happening in DOS because you could do different graphic modes but I did enjoy those little windows games

I'm not familiar with SkiFree but I do remember spending A LOT of time with Deluxe Ski Jump 2[1].

[1] https://www.mediamond.fi/dsj2/

The ultimate tribute to skifree:

Edge:surf

(Only works on ms edge.)

Opened edge for the second time since I setup this machine just to test it. Surprisingly good.

SkiFree in the Browser

https://basicallydan.github.io/skifree.js/

2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5247965

Ironically (?) so much smoother in Chrome than the native Win32 version running on the same beefy Win 10 PC.

Not the case for me. Pretty stuttery on Firefox.

But where's the snow monster? :(

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.

Damn I had completely forgotten about this game.

I'm getting that mug!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com