'80s And '90s PC Games Unbelievably Still Being Updated Today

They may have arrived decades ago, but the work (and play) continues.

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. 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, 30, even 40(!) years. When we first wrote a version of this list in 2018, all of the games we included had been updated that year. Amazingly, seven years later they're all still alive, even if updates are a bit fewer and farther between.

But almost every entry on this updated list has either been updated in 2025, or in the last couple years, with its development history making us pretty sure they'll still see another patch in the second half of this decade. We've focused on games from the '80s and '90s with interesting and slightly lesser-known histories—it's not a complete list (shout out to Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, and plenty of other famous games from the late '90s that are still thriving).

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

"Developed on a borrowed Lisa using Lisa Pascal, Klondike was one of the first games available for the original Macintosh," writes creator Michael Casteel on his website's history page. It feels silly to debate the semantics of Mac vs. PC in the face of Klondike's place in gaming history with 40 years of support from a sole developer.

The classic take on solitaire has evolved and been rewritten many times over its life. Casteel added color in 1988, animations of the cards moving in 1989, a new random number generator in 1994, additional solitaire games in 1998, high resolution face cards in 2004, replaying of your old games in 2009, resuming games in 2011, handing off in-progress games from iPhones and iPads in 2015, and Apple Silicon support in 2020.

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It feels only proper that a game that dates back at least a century would have such a dedicated steward.

Released: July 1987 | Latest update: February 16, 2023

Source: PC Gamer