A 27-year-old online role-playing game is still getting major updates in 2024, making it one of the longest-running video games ever.
While the rise of modern live services has led to many games being shut down after just a few months, there are also online titles that have been around for decades.
A notable example is Tibia, a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game originally released in 1997. 27 years later, developer Cipsoft is still releasing updates for the title, the latest of which arrived this summer.
Despite its age, Tibia isn’t a game most people have ever heard of. Yet it’s one of a surprisingly large group of MMOs that continue to thrive long after the bigger titles have been shut down by their publishers.
In the summer update, Cipsoft added new areas within the sweet-themed Candia to explore, along with new monsters, items, and gear. There’s also a wave-based survival arena called The Soulpit, which gives players special rewards if they make it to the end.
There’s even a wealth of quality of life updates, including the ability to quickly loot all nearby corpses and improvements to the in-game market interface. All the sorts of updates you’d expect a few months after launch, not 27 years later.
According to tracker website MMO Populations, Tibia is estimated to have had 8,350 players per day this month. That’s a very healthy number, especially considering the game has been out for almost thirty years.
The player count is considerably lower than the estimated number of genre king World Of Warcraft (288,745), but it is still much more than the live service game Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, which was only released this year and still had a meager peak of 627 players this week.
Tibia is far from the first MMO. One of the earliest examples was the text-based GemStone series produced by Simutronics in 1988, but 1991’s Neverwinter Nights is generally considered the first to feature actual graphics, running from 1991 to 1997 (there have been several subsequent games of the same name).
As for the oldest MMO still receiving updates today, that title likely goes to Meridian 59. Originally released in 1996 as a monthly subscription service, the title was later made available as open source software in 2012, run by some of the original developers. It last received a patch in June 2024, and is currently available for free on Steam.
Ultima Online also makes the top 10 when it comes to the longest-running title in the genre. Originally released in 1997, the game continues to be updated with new servers and rules, the latest of which is Ultima Online: New Legacy, which is scheduled for release in September of this year.
Although the genre has many precursors, including 1978’s MUD, the modern concept of a persistent online world with dozens or hundreds of players at a time was popularized by 1999’s EverQuest and later by World Of Warcraft and EVE Online in the early 2000s.
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