His name might not spark wild-eyed fascination with many retro gaming enthusiasts, but Steve Moraff was a little bit of a legend in his own time. When we first got a PC (non-Atari machine) in the early 1990’s, we jumped on the early CD-Rom craze. The best use of CDs at that time was for “shovel-ware” compilations of share-ware games. One developer out-shined all but Apogee and Id. The developer’s name was Moraffware. Started by Steve Moraff in the mid-80’s, Moraffware would pioneer shareware and especially the shareware RPG genre on DOS machines.
As we plunged into the the various piles of shareware games we found on the shovel-ware cds, Steve Moraff’s name kept surfacing on some very nice titles. He was one of the first developers anywhere to use SVGA graphics so his titles were always colorful and unique to play.
Moraff’s Revenge was one of the first 3D RPGs on the PC Dos platform. These early PCs didn’t have the raw speed on an Atari ST or Amiga, but Steve made some great games given the limitations of the hardware.
I remember some other various Moraff games such as a beautiful Arkanoid clone and probably the best Mahjongg game of its’ time. It seems that Steve has shifted his focus to Mahjongg almost entirely. His current site focuses of on this game type, but also has pages (and the ability to purchase) his classic RPG games:
and probably his best game,
Moraff’s Dungeons of the Unforgiven
There is also a World Of Games link on his site that lists some of the other classic and relatively recent games he has created.
It looks like Steve is doing well. I would certainly like to see some of his classic RPGs re-made for today’s machines, but with DosBox or Boxster, the originals can still be enjoyed today.
(8bitjeff is Jeff D. Fulton)
I wonder when and what date this article was written
This is very educational content and written well for a change. It’s nice to see that some people still understand how to write a quality post.
My Grandfather introduced me to Moraff’s World of Games back in the mid 90s. I had it myself on two Windows 95 computers I had in the late 90s. I can’t remember if I had it on a Win98 machine that was the last Windows machine I had in daily service before I switched to Linux.
In 2014 or so, I bought a Moraff’s World of Games CD I’m pretty sure direct from whatever web presence Moraff had at that time. It was basically the same 32 bit program I remember, but the games were a little different from whatever Grandpa shared with me in the 90s.
It’s the only software I think I have running on everything from an NT4 Pentium 133 to my Win7 radio programming computer to my wife’s Win10 machine. Works like a charm on every 32/64 bit Microsoft platform I’ve thrown it at thus far. The speed differential in decompressing the games on that old Pentium v. my G640 radio programming machine or my wife’s i5 machine.
I just googled to see if I could find anything and it looks like any presence Moraff had is gone now. Guess I’d better take good care of that CD.
I stand corrected, your link still works in 2021. I came up empty on “The Big G”.