there was definitely an orbit of people who ran game humor sites and the like who i was pretty friendly with in those days, but it was a pretty small group all things considered and didn't really extend past the extremely specific niche we inhabited.

i mean, i did know him online i should say, just never met face-to-face. i suppose that's some of the "are they really your friend if they're just on the computer??" sentiment i absorbed growing up manifesting in my choice of words.

Very questionable, I feel like if the possibility had existed that Steve Moraff would have crammed his games full of genai garbage. But he couldn't, and that 1 person shareware programmer art aesthetic has a kind of charm very particular to it's time and medium, I think.

it's an ironic juxtaposition, but i'm sure anyone still talking about moraff's world in 2025 has some attachment to the charmingly rough-hewn monster portraits, to the point of thinking they're kind of... beautiful?

totally different guy! i didn't actually know that rpd personally, nor do i know if his name was derived from a fictional police department

my friends, in those days we were not awash in "merch" as we are now, we wore our promotional final fantasy 7 t-shirts until they disintegrated and scrawled our allegiances in sharpie.

uhhhhhhh let me get uhhhh a gamen. no wait make that ippai gamens. and uhhhh a dr. pepper. to go please.

hard mode by way of making the player character a useless lunkhead