The oldest computer game still on the market?

[Lady Jaye]

My vote goes to WarCraft II. I can't believe that it's still being sold to this day, albeit in a Battle.net edition. If you consider that it's more a technological update (to make it playable online) rather than an actual remake, and that the original WarCraft II was released in late 1995 while its expansion pack (integrated into the battle.net edition) came out in early 1996...

It could be argued that Myst could be considered as the oldest game on the market (originally released on the Mac in 1993), but the version currently available is a graphical remake.

Incidentally, I still have the original WarCraft battlechest (which was composed of WarCraft, WarCraft II and its expansion pack, non-compatible Battle.net, of course). And we still have the original Myst (has it been 10 years already?!?).

So, do you agree with my assessment about WarCraft II being the oldest game still on the market, or do you have another title to propose?

[brykasch]

warcraft, and wolfenstein 3-d are both still being sold in jewel case as well, those are the oldest I can think off the top of my head, but not to many

[Ze_ro]

I guess it sort of depends on what you consider "on the market"... You can still buy the Forgotten Realms Archive (http://www.cdaccess.com/html/quick/ad&dforgpr.htm) on CD (for only $20 by the way... good deal), which includes most of the old Gold-Box SSI AD&D games like Curse of the Azure Bonds and Pool of Radiance... those games easily date back into the 80's. There aren't any actual "recent" games on this collection.

Although NetHack (http://www.nethack.org) is not a commercial game, it is still very much alive and in development. It's sort of difficult to say how old it is though, since it's sort of an offshoot of the older game "Hack", which was an offshoot (although probably not a direct ancestor) of the original Rogue that I think dates back well into the 70's on old mainframe Unix machines. Other Roguelike games such as Angband might also fit into this discussion, but I think NetHack is probably more closely derived from Rogue than most of the others I've seen.

--Zero

[Lady Jaye]

I find it fascinating that some games continue to be available throughout generations and generations of OSes, processor speed and type, etc. IMO, that's more challenging to pull off than just porting an older console game to a more current console, since you have to make it compatible with a variety of configurations...

[YoshiM]

I think we'd have to go by single releases and not with "compilation packs". If we go by that Ultima 1 is probably the oldest in the Ultima pack or even Zork I for that matter, available in the Zork Anthology. But in defense of Lady Jaye's vote I have seen Warcraft II being sold brand new by itself.

I'd like to chalk up Diablo (released in 1996) as another. Just something about Blizzard games that seem to stand the test of time. Duke Nukem 3D (also 1996) is also available in the jewel case discount bins and I think they include all the level packs (most released in 1996 as well). It's really hard to think of a game that's older than 1995 (except maybe Myst, but then again it's been updated to look better so it doesn't count) that's still being sold.