I was always upset when the Yeti ate me and could never figure out how to avoid it. Simple as it seems now, SkiFree was more mysterious than Solitaire or Minesweeper. Legend has it that there's a way to make a third Yeti appear, but I've never seen it.
The first Microsoft Entertainment Pack was so successful that Microsoft went on to release three more, with SkiFree debuting in Microsoft Entertainment Pack 3. They paid what he calls a 'trivial one-time fee' and it became part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack series, a bid to show that Windows was just as appropriate for homes and small businesses as it was for large enterprises. He made it independently in his spare time, licensing it back to the company he worked for. SkiFree was the brainchild of Microsoft programmer Chris Pirih. I raced downwards, doing triple backflips off rainbows, building up more and more speed to outrun death at the Yeti's hands. I'd play it at stores like Staples and Office Depot after guessing the easy passwords on the demo PCs while my parents browsed. SkiFree was a harbinger of endless runners, and the kind of games you play in brief spurts at random moments.
It's a simple game: you ski down a hill while avoiding obstacles and a ravenous, unrelenting Yeti. Almost everyone who had a Windows PC in the 1990s played SkiFree, but almost none of us know its origins.
