Laurent Bourgeois sent in an amusing link to the story of SkiFree in the words of Chris Pirih, the original Microsoft programmer who wrote it:
Wow, I actually recall spending hours on my friends’s 33Mhz machine playing this very game (last screenshot.) Ah, nostalgia.
Jeff, what’s your obsession with old-school video games? 
“some trivial one-time fee (something like 100 shares of MSFT stock, no royalties)”
Might have seemed trivial then, but cashing this in at the right time, after several stock splits wouldn’t have been anything to complain about…
MT, old school gaming rules! You’d have to be a hardcore gamer to understand. I mean, dang, I’ve hacked together my own dual arcade stick to hit MAME (http://www.mame.net) and whoop up on folks in fighting games. Fun stuff…and it makes you feel like a kid again (without wasting your allowance pumping the arcade machines full of quarters).
Man, I use to play this for hours on my Windows 3.1 along with Wolfenstein 3D
hey yea i love your game but HOW THE HELL DO YOU GET AWAY FROM THE YETI!!! ~~JOSHUA~~
The SkiFree story has definitely not ended: it is now available on iPhone (http://gizmodo.com/5496352/legendary-microsoft-game-skifree-now-free-for-the-iphone)! Let’s all claim for our Mobile and Android version.