Wikipedia's historical list of MUDs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MUDs ) suggests that MUD1 (1978, homepage: https://www.british-legends.com/CMS/ ) and MUD2 (1985, homepage: https://www.mud2.com/CMS/index.php ) might still be active. From what I can tell their codebases are pretty light on substantial updates in recent years, but then again Nethack was at point considered abandoned for about a decade.

You don't have to look very far.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moria_(1983_video_game)

> Stable release 5.7.15 / 4 June 2021; 4 years ago

Waiting for AR

Nethack is what you get when you take a team of developers and have them focus on gameplay to the exclusion of all else. No graphics, music, marketing, apps, action sequences, or profit motive. Just pure gameplay, with a richness of interactions and possibilities unmatched by more polished modern games. Nethack is so well balanced that, for most players, being gifted the three most powerful items in the game from the start barely affects your winning chances.

AI researchers think NetHack is interesting [1, 2]. You should too!

[1] https://proceedings.mlr.press/v176/hambro22a/hambro22a.pdf

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00690

NetHack is loads of fun. I have been playing since around 2008 now, have ascended 11 times, know a ton about the intricacies of the mechanics, and still find it a lot of fun.

I would say there's a small amount of nostalgia in the game for me, but nothing like the NES & SNES games I played in childhood, more than a decade before I even tried NetHack for the first time. NetHack is pure ASCII (at least that's how I play it) with no sound or music whatsoever. Most of my nostalgia for games comes from sound, music, atmosphere, and story. NetHack has a little bit of story but zero character development. Your character is just a vessel for inputting commands into the game, not a character in any dramatic sense of the word.

What makes the game so compelling, for me, is the grand challenge of figuring out what to do with the dungeon (and its contents) the game throws at me on each run. Sometimes the dungeon can be brutally unforgiving and extremely stingy with resources. Other times, it can feel ridiculously generous (only for you to make a dumb mistake and lose it all). Either way, the game is always throwing something new at you, even when you've been playing it for decades!

It's complicated. The soul of Nethack is opaque design, secrets, and emergent gameplay from mechanical interactions. In theory, the best way to play Nethack is by going in completely blind ("unspoiled"), so that you maximize the sense of discovery which is its most compelling trait. But in practice, I highly doubt that anyone in human history has ever beaten Nethack without looking up any spoilers. At some point you just get frustrated, decide enough is enough, and look up whatever spoilers are necessary to beat the game. Even getting started is rough for a beginner without spoilers, but at the same time taking a spoiler-maximalist approach is probably going to result in a pretty lackluster experience.

I'd say that, to some degree, roguelike game design has moved on, and when it comes to hilarity and sheer mechanical depth and breadth, games like Caves of Qud are probably better at evoking the feelings of Nethack without being so absolutely reliant on spoilers (which isn't to say that the game isn't still largely opaque, just that the essential parts are better-communicated). And on the flipside, anti-Nethacks like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup make it a design goal to be fun and playable even assuming a totally spoiled player, by focusing more on tactical and strategic decisions and being forthright about including all necessary information within the game itself.

"Is this fun" and "is it something a person in their 20s would want to play" are entirely different questions.

There are people who absolutely thrive doing the things NetHack rewards you for in the long term: perseverance, patience, planning, resourcefulness, risk management, strategizing, analyzing and learning systems... I feel like it has a timeless and ageless appeal to a particular kind of player and has never been quite palatable to mainstream audiences. If you like NetHack today you probably do it for the same reasons you would 30 years ago.