Lartzan Skijump (1994-1996)
Written by Ville Könönen
Graphics by Mikko Aalto and Janne Heinonen
Ski Jump International 2 (1997-1998)
Concept, design, programming, graphics, music, the works: Ville Könönen
Additional Programming: Mikko Aalto and Janne Heinonen
Additional Art: Johannes Lahti, Simo Virokannas, Toni Välitorppa
Ski Jump International 3 (2000-2011)
Concept, design, programming, graphics, webpages and what not: Ville Könönen
Additional programming and graphics: Lasse Makkonen
Account managers: Morten Indahl and Stas Szczurek
Also a throng of people credited for translations and beta testing.
The first game was released as freeware, and the latter two games as shareware for MS-DOS based PC's.
(NOTE: The picture for the floppy disk was found through an article on Matti Nykänen, written and published in 2019 on the Guardian's Sportblog, for which the picture was found through Shutterstock.)
---
INTRODUCTION
Because the Finnish Retro Game Reviews series has mainly focused on games from the 1980's and a little into the early 1990's, there hasn't been much of a chance to talk about all the amazing Finnish PC games before things started taking a more commercial turn. To me, my absolute favourite era of Finnish game development is still the mid-1990's, when eager hobbyist programmers did all sorts of non-sensical and often inappropriate DOS games with little focus on anything other than humour. This time period did produce plenty of higher quality games, too, such as Slicks 'n' Slide, which I did write about at length as an earlier FRGR entry, as well as Mine Bombers, Ultimate Tapan Kaikki and Pro Pilkki, just to name a few, and the Ski Jump trilogy - regardless of its humble beginnings - belongs to this top tier group.
