Here’s what Keith Dawson, renowned publisher of the now defunct and sorely missed “Tasty Bits from the Technology Front” newsletter, has to say on the topic of Pingu vs. Yeti which I covered in this post: Pingu vs. Yeti has been around a loooong time. In late 2003 / early 2004, when I was losing large chunks of time to the game, I remember visiting a site that linked to dozens of ripoffs and improvements on the original game — I assume that the source code had somehow escaped into the wild. The original developers, meanwhile, kept churning out new creative variations on the Yetisports theme.
The following is from a file on my system named pingu.txt, dated 2004-02-14.
_________________________ longest skip: 587.1 longest face-plant: 492.8 shortest skip: 160.5 shortest face-plant: 356.0 longest run of “whiffs”: 7 _________________________
On the evidence, that score of 587.1 is closely crowding the highest possible score. The highest of which I have found evidence on the Web is 588.8 [1] (linked from a discussion at [2], though most Pingu-Yeti discussions are moribund now as the cutting edge has moved on :). The trick, as you quickly discover, is to hit the Pingu so that he travels upward and descends at the largest angle that will produce a bounce — connecting one pixel earlier in his descent would result in a face-plant. Later, and the shallower bounce means less total distance. Operationally this means producing an arc in which Pingu just grazes the top of the playing window at apogee.
