How to play Skiing online
- Turn your skis: left and right arrow keys (tap to turn a little, hold to turn further); any arrow starts the run
- Jump a mogul (downhill, right switch on A): Space
- Back to the top: F12 (Reset); in slalom, Space does the same
- Choose a course: F11 (Select)
- Right difficulty switch: F9
- Left difficulty switch: F4
Gameplay
Your skier stays near the top of the screen while the mountain scrolls up past him. The joystick doesn’t move him directly: it turns the tips of his skis through eight positions, and he travels the way they point. Straight down the hill is fastest, turning across the slope slows you, and skis turned fully sideways stop you. Hitting a tree or flag knocks the skier down. He gets straight back up, but the clock keeps running.
In slalom you pass between pairs of flags. Your score is your time, plus five seconds for every missed gate. In downhill there are no gates; you just race to the bottom, with the remaining metres shown above the timer. The grey patches in the snow are moguls, and falling on one costs time.
Courses and switches
There are ten games. Games 1 to 4 are slalom runs of 20, 40, 30 and 50 gates, from novice to Olympic level. Games 6 to 9 are downhill runs of 200, 300, 500 and 900 metres. These eight courses never change. Games 5 and 10 create a new random course each time you select them.
Start with both difficulty switches on B. With the right switch on A, trees stand in front of the slalom gates, not just beside them, and on downhill runs you must jump moguls yourself; on B the skier jumps them automatically. With the left switch on A you can leave the trail and ski through the woods, which the manual suggests trying on the downhill runs.
Tips for faster times
- Stay close to straight down. Every turn across the slope costs speed, so plan gentle lines instead of sharp zigzags.
- Tap, don’t hold. Short taps move the skis one position. Holding swings them too far.
- Look at the bottom of the screen. That is where the next trees and gates appear, so line up early.
- Memorise the fixed courses. Games 1 to 4 and 6 to 9 never change, so the shortest route is learnable.
- Know when to skip a gate. Five seconds hurts, but a crash on a sharp turn can cost more.
The story behind Skiing
Bob Whitehead was one of the Atari programmers who left to found Activision, and he also designed Boxing for the new company. Skiing, released in December 1980, was one of Activision’s earliest games. Its TV commercial starred a made-up French ski champion. Players who finished slalom Game 3 in under 28.2 seconds could send in a photo of the screen to join the Activision Ski Team and receive a patch.
The Space Gamer praised its graphics and range of courses in 1981. Skiing also left a mark on PC gaming: Chris Pirih, creator of the Windows game SkiFree, has named it as the inspiration for the skiing game he wrote before SkiFree.
Similar games to play next
- Ski Run – another take on skiing for the 2600
- Mogul Maniac – skiing made for Amiga’s Joyboard, a board you stood on (not emulated here)
- Boxing – Bob Whitehead’s other early Activision sports game
- The Activision Decathlon – more Activision sports, with ten track-and-field events