September 14, 2000: That's the day Microsoft released Windows Millennium Edition, the second-worst iteration of Windows in its long history. It also marked the final release of MS-DOS, which for so many years had undergirded its operating systems. In 2006—two decades ago—Microsoft ceased long-term support for Windows 98 and Me, meaning that MS-DOS's life was truly over. Two days ago the latest update for NetHack dropped, and you bet your ass it still supports MS-DOS, just like it did when it first released in 1987. We already covered NetHack's surprise 5.0 release and some of its fun patch notes, but I had to dwell on this for just a minute. In the era of multimillion-dollar games releasing and shutting down within weeks, here's a game that's been steadily updated since 1987. It's only two years younger than Windows. Microsoft supported MS-DOS for a total of 25 years, from 1981 to 2006. NetHack's closing in on 40. Perhaps even more absurd is that the NetHack development team still maintains an official binary for the Amiga—you know, the personal computer line that went extinct in 1994. While it's novel as all hell that you can play a still-being-updated-in-2026 game on a decades-old PC, perhaps more appealing to most players today is a very slick, recent client for NetHack, called NetHack 3D. The game has long been open source, and while it's gotten many 2D tilesets and one very ugly 3D adaptation over the years, NetHack has always been an ASCII game first and foremost, just like Rogue and Hack before it. NetHack 3D is by far the nicest modern interface I've seen for the game—nice enough to tempt me away from playing in a terminal connected to nethack.alt.org. NetHack 3D adapts the game's incredibly complex controls into some quite intuitive context menus, with mouse support on PC and touch support on mobile. You can switch to ASCII mode if you want, but the default way to play is with a 2D tileset, and there are several options sourced from the NetHack commun