Steve Moraff

Steven Richard Moraff (born 1963) is a video game designer best known for a series of DOS games launched in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Childhood and career

Raised in Ithaca, New York, Steve Moraff's father was an IBM employee who worked on Cornell's mainframe and his mother was a child development expert. Moraff inherited his father's affinity for computers and began programming in a free computer lab provided by a local non-profit trying to start a science museum in Ithaca. He briefly attended the Alternative Community School but later dropped out of school and after taking some courses at the local Community College, he obtained his GED.

In the late 1980s, Moraff began programming games for MSDOS-based computers, culminating in the 1988 release of Moraff's Revenge,^[1] which, in addition to the SVGA graphics, was one of the earlier games to be distributed using a shareware model. This launched his career as a computer game developer and the company that would become MoraffWare and later Software Diversions, Inc. (SDI), based in Florida, which now specializes in Mahjong solitaire-type games.^[2]

In a small way, Moraff was also an early innovator in using the Internet for national politics. During the 1992 Presidential election season, he included a copy of a speech given by candidate Ross Perot to the National Press Club.

References