As modern live service games struggle to last a few months a 27-year-old MMO just got a new update

Adam StarkeyPublished Jul 8, 2024, 12:50pm|Updated Jul 8, 2024, 12:51pm

A 27-year-old online role-playing game is still getting significant updates in 2024, in what is one of the longest running video games ever.

While the modern live service boom has led to many games being shut down after mere months, there are some online titles that have been around for decades.

One notable example is Tibia, a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game which was originally released in 1997. 27 years later, developer Cipsoft is still pushing out updates for the title, with the latest being a summer update this month.

Despite its age, Tibia is not a game most people are likely to have heard of and yet it’s part of a surprisingly large group of MMOs that are still going strong long after higher profile titles have been shut down by their publishers.

In the summer update, Cipsoft has added new areas within the confectionery-themed Candia to explore, along with new monsters, items and equipment. There’s also a wave-based survival arena, titled The Soulpit, which grants players special rewards for making it through to the end.

There’s even a wealth of quality of life updates, including the ability to quickly loot all nearby corpses and enhancements to the in-game market interface. All the sort 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 – which is a very healthy amount considering it’s been out for nearly three decades.

It’s well below the estimated total of genre king World Of Warcraft, at 288,745 players, but it’s much more than live service game Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, which only came out this year and yet had a feeble 24 hour peak of 627 players this week.

Tibia is far from the first MMO. One of the earliest examples is the text-based GemStone series produced by Simutronics in 1988, but 1991’s Neverwinter Nights is widely credited as the first with actual graphics, and ran from 1991 to 1997 (there have been multiple subsequent games with the same name).

As for the oldest MMO which is still receiving updates today, that title probably 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 on Steam for free.

Ultima Online is also up there, in terms of the longest running title in the genre. Originally released in 1997, the game is still being updated with new servers and rulesets, with the latest being Ultima Online: New Legacy, which is scheduled to come out in September this year.

Although the genre has many antecedents, including 1978’s MUD, the modern concept of a persistent online world featuring dozens or hundreds of players at a time was popularised by 1999’s EverQuest, and later, World Of Warcraft and EVE Online in the early 2000s.