![]() Ultima Online (1997) Those horses are peeking over the wall of the roofless house. It's hard to gauge accurately how many active players SubSpace has across all the fan servers, but you'll definitely have no trouble finding a crowd. Arguably the definitive version, SubSpace Continuum, is available for free on Steam and the security improvements have made it a requirement in almost all popular private servers. Nonetheless, the players that did pick it up loved it enough to ensure its longevity.Įven after the official client was discontinued and the servers shut down, custom clients - which even improved on the original's cheat prevention - and fan-run servers kept the game up and running uninterrupted since it was released. Despite featuring revolutionary physics simulation and complex multi-faceted gameplay, SubSpace failed to become a commercial success. Virgin Interactive picked up that prototype and reworked it into what became SubSpace, another precursor to what MMOs have become today. Developed in 1995 not as a commercial product but rather as a test project to study latency over the crummy internet connections of the era, it turned out that the game is actually, well, good. One of the earliest space shooters, SubSpace has that sort of odd grassroots history that was very much a product of its time - stuff like this just can't happen in the video game industry anymore. ![]() Notorious for the same brand of unforgiving difficulty as many games from this era are known for, poorly created characters and unideal stat distributions could doom your adventure to failure even before you begin. Visually simple by modern standards, the 2D MMORPG still has complex gameplay mechanics and features, and practically invented the practice of instancing in multiplayer games. In its current state, The Realm Online is run by Rat Labs, and features a Free-To-Play server which brought active player numbers back up to the peak it reached during its heyday. Since then, ownership and operation of The Realm jumped from company to company. By some definitions a graphical MUD, Sierra On-Line's proto-MMO was groundbreaking, but soon eclipsed by the more technically advanced Ultima Online and EverQuest just one and three years later, respectively.ĭespite being a pioneer in the genre, Sierra soured on The Realm due to the appearance of 3D competitors and offloaded the game to a subsidiary. Recently (as far as the game's lifespan is concerned) renamed The Realm Online, this was an early experiment into what would evolve to be the modern MMORPG. 4K? Particle Effects? Microtransactions? Forget that nonsense, let's go to the tavern. The Realm (1996) Wake up mate! You fell asleep in front of the CRT. With that out of the way, let's jump right into the top longest running games, in no particular order. If anything, they'd deserve their own article. ![]() There are tons of them, many of which have been up and running for even longer than the oldest game on this list, and they're also less resource intensive to maintain. If any of these titles spark an old memory that you'd love to relive, there's nothing holding you back - and we do suspect a lot of you who played some of these might be actively doing so today.īefore we proceed, you might note the lack of MUDs (multi user dungeons) on the list - this isn't because we don't consider them valid or 'real games' or other nonsense like that, but because including them would feel a bit like cheating. No, dear reader, this time we're not going to talk about whether or not gaming was really better in the past instead we invite you on a stroll down memory lane - but this isn't your regular nostalgia fueled reminisce, as the decade-old games on this list are still going strong today. There was a time, however, when things were different. Live-service games maximize microtransaction revenue with long-term and frequent content updates, meanwhile the AAA machine never stops churning and the profit and popularity surge of a sequel is tantalizing for large publishers. ![]() Video games are sort of stuck in a kind of temporal limbo nowadays.
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