Denis McCrane's Ski Jumping Challenge: Sarajevo 1983

Note! The game may get falsely flagged as malware. It's not, though.

Denis McCrane's Ski Jumping Challenge is a game created in 72 hours for the Lost Cartridge Jam 2021. The textmode ski jumping game was coded in QB64 and is available for Windows. The game was coded in 72 hours, but some planning took place before that, and also the game's backstory (see below) was written before the jam.

Read below for the full story of the game and how it was found 38 years too late.

(The story of Denis McCrane's Ski Jumping is fictional. If you are a former U.S. Olympic ski jumper with something to say, please get in touch!)

In 1983 a small game development studio called Uncultured Games had a groundbreaking idea.

Prior to the massively popular global event that was the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, they would program the first ever ski jumping game, hopefully kicking off a massive ski jumping game franchise and a global ski jumping craze.

It took several months for the team of five professionals to design and program the game. To increase the sales, they had an idea. Electronic Arts had just published the first ever licensed sports game Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One on One, which featured NBA stars Julius Erving and Larry Bird. Uncultured Games decided to adapt a similar strategy: they'd get a popular ski jumper on board and name the game after him. Producer Leroy Unexempt wrote a letter to a sought-after U.S. ski jumper called D.M.* who was set to appear in the Sarajevo Olympics. In his letter, Mr. Unexempt argued that the game would most likely create a massive ski jumping fever among the United States kids. A few days later they received a fax: the famous ski jumper was excited about the project and agreed to a deal for a 3 percent royalty.

(*For legal reasons, we can't reveal the real identity of the ski jumper.)

A rare photo of the Uncultured Games offices in 1983. The man wearing glasses is believed to be the game's graphic designer Jack Monarch, while the man with the tie has reliably been identified as produced Leroy Unexempt. (Source: Juha Poutanen, Aalto University Archives, CC BY 4.0)

The release date was quickly approaching and spirits were high. But then it all fell apart.

It was a rainy Tuesday evening in November, when the game's director Aleph Barr accidentally found out that his fiancee Iris Deem, who was the main programmer at Uncultured Games, had been sleeping with the game's producer Leroy Unexempt. Vowing to never apologize, Aleph Barr walked out and jumped in his Fiat Uno, abandoning both his fiancee and game development for life. The team would never hear from him again, but in 1993 a freelance journalist appeared to have tracked Barr down, claiming later that he had become a somewhat wealthy gas station entrepreneur in Arkansas. Iris Deem and Leroy Unexempt tried to make their adulterous relationship work, but it turned out Aleph Barr's decision to leave had left them both scarred for life and so they decided to turn things platonic and travel the world as vagabonds.

In 1993, a local paper claimed to have found Aleph Barr running several gas stations in Arkansas. According to the report, Barr was barely recognizable due to excessive plastic surgery.

But that's not all...

After hearing about the incident, the ski jumper D.M. had pulled out of the contract, prohibiting Uncultured Games from using his name in any connection with the game. At this point it was clear to everyone that there was not going to be a ski jumping fever in the U.S., if anywhere...

The remaining team members, graphic designer Jack Monarch and adviser Homer Ronjo tried everything to fix the game, which both of them considered their Magnum Opus (which it sadly was). Monarch and Ronjo had no experience in programming, but they decided to try and publish the game anyway. In order to avoid legal issues, all they had to do was make minor adjustments to the code: rename the game and remove all direct references to Mr. D.M. and the 1984 Sarajevo Olympic Games.

They failed miserably. With their abysmal programming skills, Monarch and Ronjo quickly corrupted the source code. They spent weeks trying to fix it, but the code written by Iris Deem was far too sophisticated, and all their efforts just made things worse. Eventually they were forced to give up and abandon their life's work. According to unverified reports in the late 1990s, they had become farmers in the Midwest, specialising in turnip.

It looked like the game would be forever lost. But sometimes miracles happen.

Fast forward to 2021...

...when the Cambodian Police discovered the bodies of two western pensioners by a riverside in Phnom Penh. The pair had died peacefully, and the police quickly learned their identities: they were the U.S. citizens Iris Deem and Leroy Unexempt. Among Ms. Deem's belongings the police found an old scuffed notebook containing dozens of pages written in BASIC dialect. The group of policemen, who had by chance just been taking BASIC classes in their local community collage together, quickly found out the magnitude of their discovery: it was the original source code to a legendary unreleased ski jumping game, forever thought to be lost!

Two Cambodian policemen, both fluent in BASIC, are seen carrying Iris Deem's belongings back to the police station. The notebook containing the source code is thought to be in the box carried by the police officer in the striped shirt.

Back at the station, the group of policemen dug up their old ZX Spectrum and took turns to carefully type in all the 3644 lines of code. Line after line, they were amazed by the simplistic beauty, sophistication and nuance of Ms. Deem's code. When they finished, it was way past midnight, and a full moon was lighting up the streets of Phnom Penh. Before running the program for the first time, one of the younger policemen noted that they should probably honor the memories of Jack Monarch and Homer Ronjo too, so they decided to work on the code to remove all references to the ski jumper D.M. and the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics. With their extensive community collage experience, the Cambodian policemen were able to complete Monarch's and Ronjo's work, this time without corrupting the code.

In late November 2021, with high hopes, the group of Cambodian policemen went and released the game on Itch.io, almost exactly 38 years after the disastrous evening when Aleph Barr had walked out. But it quickly turned out that the gaming scene had moved on in those 38 years, and only a handful of adventurous creeps ended up downloading the game – most of them hating every moment of it. Disheartened, the Cambodian policemen decided to quit game dev for life and stick to policing the streets of Phnom Penh.

But the saga of Denis McCrane's Ski Jumping Challenge: Sarajevo 1983 had finally been completed.

****

Controls:

• Look at the wind meter, and press (SPACE) to start your descent.
• While descending from the ramp, tap the (A) and (D) keys alternately to build up your speed meter.
• Once at the take-off table, hold (SPACE) to jump. Starting your jump too early will result in a weak jump. Try to maximize your leap by holding (SPACE) down for as long as possible.
• While airborne, wind may pull you away from the center. Press (LEFT) or (RIGHT) to re-center and jump longer.
• To land, press (SPACE) when the ski jumper's shadow turns yellow. The landing will fail if (SPACE) is pressed too early or too late.