Talk:Steve Moraff

Living

The article kind of uses inconsistent verb tenses -- is he still alive? AnonMoos 09:07, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

He evidently has still been going in recent years, as the article perhaps makes clearer now than it did in 2006, at the time of the above comment. In 2013 he apparently even chimed in to comment on a review of Moraff's Revenge. —Undomelin (talk) 00:37, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

Graphics

Moraff's Revenge (the first RPG released in 1988) had four-color CGA graphics, not SVGA as the article says. I remember this distinctly since I played it on a machine that didn't even have a CGA card and required software emulation. JonathanRRogers (talk) 17:55, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

This, from memory, later morphed into "Dungeons of the Unforgiven", 1993, one of the few games to run from Windows 3.1 with excellent SVGA graphics. Lmstearn (talk) 11:08, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Regarding Notablity

I see this article has had a notability template since 2013. I'd argue in favor of considering the software notable. I remember MoraffWare software being featured in The Software Labs catalogues (...yup I found an example, Entrap on page 6 of the Summer 1993 issue ), and getting passed along as shareware.

Given the scant verifiable biographical information available, I wonder if the article would be better if retitled and changed to be about the Moraffware brand/company ("MoraffWare was a software brand/company noted for shareware titles..."), and Moraff himself described in a founder/head section. (Or perhaps the title would be his current brand name, Software Diversions, and have a redirect from MoraffWare?)

There is a profile of Moraff himself in a couple of books, but Google Books snippets only lets me see:

Steve Moraff, MoraffWare

---

Steve Moraff was one of the first independent game developers to release "shareware" in the early 1980s, though he was not aware of the term shareware until a few years later. Some of his best-selling work includes MoreJongg, SphereJongg, and RingJongg, three variations of the classic Asian tile game Mahjongg available from his Florida company, MoraffWare (www.moraff.com).

There are a number of fond reminiscences on the Web for the software titles, however, and YouTube contains many captured videos of their gameplay.

Perhaps something that might add a little to the notability, that searching Google Books turned up: Raph Koster apparently mentioned having gotten his start in the business with MoraffWare:

Ramsay: How did you get Started in the video game industry?

Koster: A friend of mine, Rick Delashmit, applied for a job at a game company called Morafiware. They asked for a sample: a board game done as a video game. He then asked me if he could port over a board-game design of mine that I had playtested with him called “Nexus." He ended up getting the job. and I was paid a few hundred bucks for the digital rights to the game. In retrospect, the game was pretty terrible: the more we played it. the more we realized it was really susceptible to degenerate Strategies! But, hey, it was my first real, professional game credit.

Incidentally, one unusual thing I remember from Moraff's Blast was that the shareware payment information help screen advised that in lieu of payment, they also accepted cultural souvenirs from the user's part of the world. I wonder how many they received. —Undomelin (talk) 02:30, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

References