FRGR #18: Ski Jump International trilogy (PD/Ville Könönen, 1994-2000)

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.)

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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.

If I were to attempt at giving all three Ski Jump games some sort of a scoring, they would have to be given based on their own assets, instead of as a comparison to any other game, because prior to these Ski Jump games, there really had been no worthy alternative to them. So, any scoring will have to wait until the very end of this review/retrospective.

What makes Finland such an obvious country to produce high quality games based entirely on the wintery sport of ski jumping, is the fact that our country was the only country to combine high success rate at olympic ski jumping with an enormous amount of hobbyist computer programmers in the 1980's and 1990's. With the legendary Matti Nykänen winning the large hill in Sarajevo in 1984, and Finland winning the full set of gold medals for both individual hills and the large hill team event in the 1988 Calgary olympics (lead by Nykänen), and Toni Nieminen taking the bronze medal in Albertville in 1992, it could be easily said, ski jumping was the favourite sport in the country during this period, only to be replaced by ice hockey in 1995. Although I cannot say, whether the timing of the making of the first game in the series had any relevance in its creation, because the other reason for starting to make a proper standalone ski jumping game might have just as easily been the sheer lack of such games, compared to the already oversaturated market of ice hockey games. I'd say it was a stroke of genius for Ville Könönen to start working on his original game when he did.

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LARTZAN SKIJUMP (1994-1996)

Lartzan Skijump 1.0 in all its glory.

As I said earlier, the beginnings of Könönen's Ski Jump game series were humble. The sport of ski jumping had been well represented before in commercial multi-event sport games, such as Epyx's Winter Games and Accolade's Winter Challenge in both 2D and 3D, but what Lartzan Skijump (ENG: Lartza's Ski Jump) did to make the sport much more replayable was make the gameplay stupidly simple but next to impossible to master. Of course, it didn't start off particularly impressive, because the first version only featured one hill in a single static screen, and just one game mode - free practice - but as the game got gradually upgraded, the amount of hills added up to no less than fifteen, and more game modes were implemented, such as high score tables, a solo/PVP cup mode, and a team cup mode, and soon enough, fans of the game started posting their results to the homepage of Lartzan Skijump, where hill records are still kept after all this time. This took Ville almost two years to get the game to this point, and from what I've gathered, while he was at it, he was apparently doing his duty for the country in the armed forces.

Lartzan Skijump v1.71 menu screens.

By the time v1.71, the final version of Lartzan Skijump was released, the game also featured such high quality features as an additional test run for each jump, statistics, animations, and even an adjustable slowdown feature for higher-tier PC's, but the game still lacked some much-needed polish, personality, and inducements for international gaming population.

Lartzan Skijump hill examples, with new world record notification in the middle screen.

The basic gameplay of Lartzan Skijump is simple enough. To start a jump, you just press any key to send off your ski jumper, which looks like a stick on a stick, to descend the ramp. Although, here, you can only see a short bit of flat surface at the end of the jumping ramp, so you need to keep a close eye on the ski jumper's appearance, because he can appear at various different speeds and there are shorter and longer ramps to jump from - and of course, timing is everything. Hit the up key somewhere near the edge of the jumping ramp to jump, and try to time it so you get no either penalty noise (a high-pitched tick) for pushing off too early or see the skis slap slightly when you push off too late. Just before you collide with ground, you have to press either R or T to land either normally or with a special telemark landing for more points. Using the telemark landing technique is more risky, and can result in the ski jumper falling after landing, so doing a telemark landing usually requires a little more time than a normal landing.

Lartzan Skijump v1.71, more hill examples.

After landing, your performance is scored by five unseen judges, with points given by the combination of distance and style. You need to reach at least the 15th place to get any points at all, and the gold medalist for the hill will be awarded 30 points. For each hill, you get a test run and two scored attempts, which accumulate the score into the final standings. The scored attempts are displayed on blue screens, and the final results of each given hill is displayed on a red screen. If you play in Cup mode, you will get to see all your standings and scores sequenced in a green screen. The final standings are shown on a turqoise screen.

Since I mentioned humour as being a large part of Finnish indie game development in these days, one of the most glaringly obvious displays of Finnish off-the-wall humour can be seen in the scoreboards of Lartzan Skijump and its sequels, where you can see Finnish and foreign celebrities - living and deceased - in the line-up of ski jumpers you're up against, such as Keke Rosberg, Henry Rollins, Elvis Presley, Homer Simpson and Jari Litmanen, just to name a few of the more recognizable ones.

Lartzan Skijump v1.71, scoreboards:
Left for hill scores for the second round - Right for the final scores for the entire Lartza Cup.

My personal introduction to Könönen's Ski Jump games was through the second in the trilogy, so even back in the 90's, it was a shock to see, how much more basic the original game was, even at its most advanced. What happened with the first sequel was, the "Lartzan" bit was dropped from the title; and with the addition of several languages, Ski Jump became international, along with having many other upgrades, resulting in what many consider to be the epitome of ski jumping games.

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SKI JUMP INTERNATIONAL 2

When you first launch the game, the main menu doesn't really look like it has gone through any particular changes, aside from being now in English, but then again, why change something that works well enough. Note to anyone from Microsoft reading this, which I suppose is no one. Even if you go into the setup screen before starting the game, you will notice that the game now has scrolling, which is one of the many big advancements from the first game. The way the scrolling works is, right after your ski jumper has hopped off of the ramp, the jumper graphic latches on to the middle of the screen (somewhere above the actual middle point), and the screen scrolls smoothly ahead, following the jumper's flight curve until the end of the map is reached. Although I didn't really think much of it at the time of active playing, I have to say, it is a rather neat thing to witness after thinking, how it actually works. Anyway, as the setup screen says, some VGA boards might require an alternate scrolling method, but I've never witnessed it, so I can't really say anything about it.

Ski Jump International 2 (unregistered), menu screens

Other features introduced into the series through SJ2 are the warm up round (optional); a shorter set of hills included in the middle of the game (Four Hills of the Americas) which can be played as a separate entity; and a Team Cup mode, which allows you to play teams of human players against teams of other human players. A big part of what made SJ2 such an addicting game was the introduction of a randomly changing wind, which you had to keep an eye on to have any hope for good results.

SJ2 hill preview screens

SJ2 eventually moved from having a plain stick-on-a-stick to an optional ski jumper graphic that actually looked more like a human. Perhaps some might think it weird, but I always preferred the stick-on-a-stick look, because that gave a better visual for a more accurate control over the ski jumper's leaning angle. So in a way, Könönen already perfected something of his game in its first incarnation.

Other nice visual upgrades designed for SJ2 worth mentioning are the custom background images for all 15 hills, a dynamic info panel at the bottom with plenty of useful information, the loading screens with nothing but a "please wait" type message in various different languages and styles, and perhaps the most unnecessary but exciting one: the current top five scores for the hill as a small box at the start of each jump, unless you're the first one to jump.

SJ2, starting down various hills.

While all these new modes and visual upgrades were all excellent features to have, it was really the finetuned, smoother gameplay that made SJ2 the classic that people still consider it as, and of course, the addition of the wind element helped a lot in making the game as addicting as it is. I'm sure a big part of SJ2's appeal was timing-related, and the fact that it was only possible to be played as a hot seat game between friends. If any of you readers have no idea what "hot seat" means, because I'm not sure this term even exists anymore in modern games, it's a turn-based multiplayer game mode on a shared keyboard.

SJ2, further down some other hills.

Of course, if you're planning on playing the game on DOSbox these days, it does require some little tweaking before you get the optimal game speed. Back when we used to play this one, the current PC's were the likes of Pentium 75-150 MHz and an SVGA video card, and a keyboard. Nothing else really mattered in this context, even if you did have all the usual sound cards and whatnot, which made it perfect to play on school computers without attracting any unnecessary attention.

SJ2 screens with upgraded real guy graphics.

Ski Jump International v2 was big and advanced enough for Könönen to make the game shareware, so if you wanted the full-fledged product, you had to register the game via e-mail or snailmail for a varied amount of money, depending on whether you wanted the game to be sent on a disk or as an attachment to your e-mail. This also allowed Könönen to finally make some money from all his hard coding work. With an unregistered version of the game, you had the Team Cup mode locked, full statistics and hill previews unavailable, a lesser amount of players to be allowed to sign up, and if you had one of the later versions of SJ2, the registered version also allowed to change the colour of your ski jumper's jumpsuit. Happily, the registered version of SJ2 was made freely available at the SJ3 website years later, but it's a bit difficult to find, so just follow this link, and scroll all the way down and you should be able to see a download link to the registered SJ2.

SJ2 scoreboards and hill records.

Finally, it is well worth mentioning, that SJ2 also brought on custom hill graphics and custom opponent name sets, which could be downloaded from the SJ2 website and replace the old files in the SJ2 directory (or folder, as kids these days call them). Customization was really becoming a huge part of gaming back then, and this easy way of customizing was what only helped SJ2's longevity. Of course, this was just a small step compared to what happened next.

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SKI JUMP INTERNATIONAL 3

I have to be honest here, SJ3 is not a game I ever really came back to, nor did I play it very much in the first place, because my initial reaction to the game was, that it had gotten a bit out of hand. Already from the first menu screen, it was plain to see, that this was now a much more serious game with simulation-like elements included in a similar vein to what you might find in old high-tier sport games like Sensible World of Soccer. But now is as good a time as any to give SJ3 a proper revisit, and see what I missed over 20 years ago.

SJ3 menus and hill editor (right).

Immediately upon launching SJ3, it's plain to see that we're not in cheap and charming ASCII-land anymore, because even the menu system uses actual bitmap images (in PCX format) as backgrounds and a highlighter cursor-based menu selector. The menus themselves are a vast sea to get lost into, and find all sorts of things you could have never thought of ever needing when still playing SJ2.

SJ3 in-game screens, part 1.

Firstly, in the setup menu, you get three different sub-options menus for General options, Jumping options, and Hiscore and Setup options, as well as a chance to customize keys, set hill record goals, and what had only been waiting to happen - design your own hills. The hill designer, however, is just another menu that allows you to change various parameters to create a custom hill, and then name it to your liking, but you can insert your own background images into the hills, provided that you have them in the accurate form.

SJ3 in-game screens, part 2.

The General options menu gives you the options for selecting language, toggling beeps, switching graphical details between low and normal (no stick-on-a-stick jumper available, unfortunately), and use custom opponent namesets. The Jumping options menu gives you eleven different options concerning jumping, such as training rounds, all sorts of things regarding statistics and scoreboards, and perhaps most importantly, the option to use a knock-out system in the four hills set. The Hiscore and Setup options allows you to reset and/or zero the hiscores, return default setup values, toggle identical names on the list and toggle computer jumpers' hill records. So, yeah, there's a lot to take in before you actually get into the game, and it feels like all possible ideas that had not been used in SJ2 were now implemented into the final part of the trilogy, effectively making it unnecessary to develop the series further.

SJ3 in-game screens, part 3.

SJ3 brought on more fully fledged player profiles, with custom colours, selectable coaching styles and lots of statistics that would get updated as you played with the profile. Also, in the actual game mode menu (or Jump menu), the usual Practise, World Cup, Four Hills and Team Cup modes, you now get two additional modes: Custom World Cup and King of the Hill. In Custom mode, you could make your own list of hills to play a World Cup on, even repeating hills to make a set of, say, 40 hills, if you wished to. In King of the Hill mode, your mission is to beat all computer jumpers in as many rounds as are given to you through the chosen challenge level, of which there are six to choose from. The shortest one, "Little girls in pink dresses", features only six computer jumpers, while the longest one, "The ultimate challenge", features twenty computer jumpers. There is also a custom King of the Hill mode, which allows you to choose opponents, the hill to jump, the wind or lack of it, and the number of rounds to jump for each drop.

Of course, the megalomaniac upgrade from SJ2 wouldn't be complete without considerably upgraded graphics and a larger amount of hills to jump, extending from SJ2's 15 to 20, without counting the possible custom-built hills. With the upgraded graphics, though, the look of the game became slightly less sharp, which makes it more difficult to aim for pixel-perfect timing in your jumps, but then it made all the new hills much nicer to look at, and all the custom-built hills more interesting to see and play. For serious SJ players, one of the most important upgrades for SJ3 was the chance to save your best jumps as replay files and share them on the SJ3 website, just as you could with all your custom hills and custom cup modes. The only thing that hasn't really been touched to any real extent is the sound effects, which continue to exist only in the form of beeps coming from the PC speaker, but even there you get a slight upgrade, as there are now a couple of different kinds of beeps to indicate, how far from the optimal jumping point you are.

SJ3, various score screens from the game's entire length.

What I always felt like the most disappointing aspect of SJ3 was dropping the hilariously absurd default competitor celebrity names in favour of a roster of actual ski jumpers from that point in time, because it always feels more important that you jump better than Ho Chi Minh or Kofi Annan, than, say, Janne Ahonen or Sigurd Pettersen. The second-most disappointing thing about SJ3 was the more realistic background graphics, which felt bland and unimaginative compared to SJ2's absurd tribal graffitis, sci-fi pictures and child-produced art, as an example. The only tiny bit of humour I could find was, that you can spit before taking off by pushing the left arrow key. So, what we got with SJ3 was the first almost entirely serious and realistic ski jumping simulator ever produced, but with the previous game's humour and personality taken as casualties on the side, which is largely the reason why most people I know who have played all these games prefer SJ2.

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FINAL WORDS AND LEGACY

After some extensive playing of all three games and some of their different versions, my opinion hasn't really altered from what it has been all these years. SJ2 works the best for me, because it's equally perfect to play, silly and charming in all the ways that makes old Finnish DOS games so great. The most important thing about it is, that it doesn't try to take itself too seriously, all the while being perfect enough to play.

If I were to give some sort of scoring for all three games, I suppose they would go something like this:

Just to give you a better idea of what I've been on about in the above rants, here's a self-compiled video presentation of all three games with some of their variations.

In hindsight, I suppose the reason behind getting SJ3 as serious and modifiable as it did was, because a game called Deluxe Ski Jump, a three-dimensional spiritual successor for SJ2, was developed by Jussi Koskela and released in July 1999. The next year, Koskela would establish a small company called Mediamond, through which he would publish the next three games in the quadrilogy, the last of which was last updated no further than November 27th this year.

With Deluxe Ski Jump having become the new yardstick for ski jumping games, there haven't been all that many attempts at new up-to-date / state-of-the-art ski jumping games until recently. The ones I have managed to get into my Steam collection and even enjoy on occasion are Ultimate Ski Jumping 2020, developed by Blue Sunset Games and released in 2020; and Ski Jumping World Cup, developed by Storm Trident S.A. and released on the 21st of November 2025, so these sorts of games really don't come around too often. Both of these games are relatively cheap, and well worth the small payment to check them out, and both games have their own particular charm to them.

That's it for now, I hope that suited the purpose well enough to celebrate the 108th Independence Day. If you didn't get enough of Finnish ski jumping history with this one, click here to check out the legendary Calgary large hill jumps by Matti Nykänen. Thanks for reading, see you later, and HYVÄÄ ITSENÄISYYSPÄIVÄÄ for you fellow Finns out there!