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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
It’s the “The Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page”