The Oldest PC Games Still Getting Updated Today

Head on over to PC Gamer if you’d like to see a list of PC games released back in the 80s and 90s that are still getting regular official updates. The list mainly includes roguelikes and MMORPGs like NetHack and Ultima Online and offers a quick overview for these old-school titles as well as an easy way to find them.

Here’s the intro and just one example:

The life cycle of a game isn’t easy to predict. Some start strong and burn out quickly, others endure for years before slowly fading away. Some crash and burn on day one while others are kept alive by players, modders, and community creators long after they might have otherwise slipped away.

A few games, however, have lived on for decades, kept alive not just by passionate fans but by developers who have never thrown in the towel or dusted off their hands and said “done.” These games have, against all odds, managed to withstand the test of time. They’re still being worked on after 20 and even 30 years, and all of them have had updates in 2018. We’ve focused on games from the 80s and 90s with interesting histories, but this is hardly a complete list (shout out to Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, and plenty of other games from 1999-2001 that are still running).

Here are the oldest PC games that are still being maintained today.

NetHack

Trace NetHack allll the way back, and it’s actually an evolution of Hack, circa 1984, itself a derivation of 1980’s Rogue. In 1987, a developer named Mike Stephenson wrote his own expanded version of Hack and released it under a new name: NetHack. This major update to the nascent roguelike added a bunch of new classes like Samurai, Valkyrie, and Priest, very basic IBM graphics support, the Excalibur, and much more. You can read old USENET discussions and actually see the origins of NetHack as they played out online in 1987, which is pretty incredible.

More incredible is that the latest update to this game was released in April 2018, and there’s no sign it will be the last one. The latest release is 3.6.1 and comes hot on the heels of 2015’s 3.6.0. Seriously though: prior to that, the last release was in 2003! Because NetHack is a game built so heavily around random generation, it doesn’t really need updates to remain interesting and playable. There’s no RPG-esque dialogue to get tired of and no need for new quests, like the MUDs on this list.

Still, there were a couple very important additions in 3.6.1:

• Blinded hero or monster who eats a nurse corpse will have blindness cured
• Allow taming monkeys and apes with bananas

The best place to play NetHack today is on the server nethack.alt.org, which maintains leaderboards, lets you spectate other active players, and encounter the “bones” of other failed adventurers in your own dungeons. They usually have some pretty good loot—just watch out for the monster that killed them, which will be lurking on the same floor, too.