Become SkiFree's yeti and devour skiers in this free little game
Become your childhood nemesis in Yeti Upsetti
If you ever experienced the horror of being chased and devoured by a yeti in Microsoft's SkiFree, reader dear, it's time for you to confront your nightmares. A fun little free game offers you the opportunity to become the yeti, chasing skiers down the slopes yourself and cramming their crumpled bodies into your cruel maw. It's a few minutes of fun, and I did enjoy remembering the many hours I spent trying to escape the inevitable.
You can play Yeti Upsetti for free in your browser over on Itch.io.
Robert Shenton made Yeti Upsetti for the GMTK Game Jam 2023, a 48-hour competition to make a game around the theme "roles reversed". Lots of other entries look interesting so I'll be having a good rummage.
SkiFree launched in 1991 as part of a game compilation for Windows 3.0, the Microsoft Entertainment Pack 3. It's a cheery little arcade game, where you go bouncing over moguls, dodging trees, catching big air off rainbow ramps, and falling on your bum. And, eventually, you reach the abominable snowman. This terrible pixel art creature will chase you downhill until you inevitably make a mistake. You're done. You're dinner.
Yeti Upsetti tells me that the big guy is so hungry that he must consume several extreme sports enthusiasts every minute or he'll die, but couldn't he at least try hitting the ski lodge for cocoa and fondue?
As a child, I was fascinated by the monster. Surely I could beat it if I got good enough. Surely they wouldn't put it in here just to devour me. I tried over and over as I kneeled in front of the 386 which sat on the dressing-up box in my brother's bedroom, trying to dodge trees and rocks I couldn't properly see behind the permanent colourful spots caused by me trying to clean sticky fingerprints off the CRT monitor using a magnetic window cleaner.
SkiFree creator Chris Pirih has released a (more) modern 32-bit version free to download from his website, though my computer struggled to run that at a good framerate, even more than the family 386 did. You'd be better off playing the emulated version on the Internet Archive, and that's handily playable in your browser too.