Professional Ski Simulator
A skiing game built around timed downhill courses, bringing winter sports to home computers in the Twins' Codemasters catalogue.
Image credits and source
Original cover / promotional artwork
Credit: Codemasters — artwork belongs to its respective rights holders
Source: The Oliver Twins archive
Game at a glance
- Status
- Classic
- Released
- 1987
- Platforms
- Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga
- Genres
- Sports
- Developer
- The Oliver Twins (original development)
- Publisher
- Codemasters
Development and publication
Development: The Oliver Twins (original development). Publication: Codemasters.
The named development credit refers to the original or specifically identified version. Other ports and later re-releases may have different development teams.
Making the game
With the success of Super Robin Hood, Ghost Hunters and Grand Prix Simulator we treated ourselves to a Skiing holiday in Austria with the Darlings.
Ridding Ski lifts gives lots of thinking time, and we got to wonder if there was a way to produce a skiing game. Our previous simulator was top-down and we didn’t feel this would work. Then we had the idea that we could create the mountain slopes using isometric 3D graphics like Marble Madness – one of our favourite games in the arcades at the time.
We felt that producing the 3D isometric scrolling background was high risk and so set about doing this first, in case we couldn’t pull it off. After about a week, we had a fairly good solution, one good enough that we should proceed to write the full game and produce all the necessary graphics. We were frustrated that we couldn’t increase the scrolling speed and frame rate and felt the game was more like cross country skiing, but it did look lovely!
Bizarrely this game was developed in the height of summer.
Original documents
Archived Professional Ski Simulator document (PDF)