The History of SkiFree: Chris Pirih, Microsoft and a Pack of Floppy Disks

Somewhere in Microsoft in the early 1990s, a programmer named Chris Pirih was writing a little skiing game in his spare time. He liked skiing. He liked the idea of a game where you just pointed down a hill and went.

He couldn't have known that thirty years later, people would still be talking about the monster he hid at the bottom.

Made for fun

SkiFree started as a personal project. It was small and quick to load, built to run on the computers of the time. Pirih filled the slope with trees, rocks, moguls, ski lifts, other skiers and a dog, and gave it a cheeky sense of humour.

The Entertainment Pack

Pirih wrote the game in C on his home computer. A manager on Microsoft's Entertainment Pack team spotted him playing it at work, and in 1991 SkiFree was released as part of Microsoft Entertainment Pack 3, one of a series of small games sold for Windows. These packs came on floppy disks in a box, and they were full of quick, simple games for people who'd just bought a computer and wanted something to do on it.

Did SkiFree come with Windows?

Not exactly. This is one of the most common questions. SkiFree wasn't part of Windows itself. It came in an Entertainment Pack. But those packs were so common, and got copied onto so many machines, that it felt like it came with every computer.

The internet keeps it alive

Years later, Pirih put up a page about SkiFree and shared a version that ran on newer Windows. Fans rebuilt it in browsers, wrote about the Yeti, and argued about how to escape him. The game outlived the computers it was made for.

Play it today

Our SkiFree remake is built to match the look and feel of the 1991 original.

For the rest of the pack, read the Windows 3.1 games we grew up with. For everything else, there's the complete SkiFree guide.