ski, a fun and silly game

Imagine you are skiing down an infinite slope, facing such hazards as
trees, ice, bare ground, and the man-eating Yeti!  Unfortunately,
you have put your jet-powered skis on backwards, so you can't see
ahead where you are going; only behind where you have been.  However,
you can turn to either side, jump or hop through the air, teleport
through hyperspace, launch nuclear ICBMs, and cast spells to call the
Fire Demon.  And since the hazards occur in patches, you can
skillfully outmaneuver them.  A fun and very silly game that proves
you don't need fancy graphical user interfaces to have a good time.

This is a Python reimplementation of a C game from 1990, with on-line
help added.  The original was by Mark Stevans, this implementation is
released under open-source terms by Eric S. Raymond.

The internals of this game are actually kind of interesting.  The terrain
generator is a simple cellular automaton that generates crude 2D fractals.

See
		http://www.catb.org/~esr/ski/

for updates and related resources.

On 15 May 2006 Mark Stevans wrote:
>Just wanted to thank you.  Very nice port, love the full-color
>graphics.  Originally it was FORTRAN on DEC-10's, ported to C around
>1981.  Your Python version should keep Ski! viable for another 10-20
>years, but I might try to put up a Ruby version for the heck of it....

Years later I learned that the game had originally been written to use
VT-100 terminals.