There are professional game retrospectives, and then there is Bimshwel’s page about Moraff’s Dungeons of the Unforgiven, which appears to have been written under the influence of prolonged exposure to rainbow garbage cans.
The page says its original version appeared around mid-2000. It documents a 1993 DOS dungeon crawler from Moraffware with screenshots, quoted marketing copy, technical observations, old correspondence, and an unreasonable amount of commentary about the game’s monsters.
The monsters deserve it.
Among them are walking garbage cans, toxic-waste containers with limbs, vaguely diseased creatures, and enemies whose animation is effectively produced by flipping graphics back and forth.
A review accidentally became preservation
The page is funny, but the historical value is underneath the jokes.
It records the game’s support for an absurd range of display modes: Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA, Super VGA, and high-resolution modes that required choosing from old video-adapter chipsets.
It reproduces the old FILE_ID.DIZ shareware description advertising “HOTTEST SVGA EVER!!” and “25 levels of the most realistic 3D imaging ever seen in a computer game.” It also preserves the later disclaimer insisting that the game was not a Doom clone.
That is pure shareware archaeology.
The author also records contacting Moraffware and being told that Steve Moraff had moved away from the old DOS dungeon games and had no plans to update them.
What began as mockery therefore became a primary record of a software line already slipping out of circulation.
The site even notes that the page itself moved between hosts over the years. That gives it the familiar old-Web double layer: an article about abandoned software that nearly became abandoned Web content.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is full of pages where obsessive humor preserved things more effectively than formal institutions did.
Nobody appointed this page the official historical archive of Dungeons of the Unforgiven.
It just kept existing longer than the thing it was making fun of.