Sorry, Curt, but even as a guy who gets annoyed at how a significant number of people think that anything older than six months is ancient I have to say that a game from twenty-five years ago is old.
Uh, Monkey Island 1 and 2 are older than Doom 1 and 2.
You never heard of those?
SimCity 2000
Princess Maker 2
Star Control II is from 1992.
So are Civ and SimCity 2000. And probably Master of Magic - I don’t know the exact date, but MoM was released in the same year as Doom, and Doom came out in December, so there’s a good chance MoM came first. (Of course, it took them a good year to get a properly playable version out. Buggy-ass game, it was.)
NetHack, I see on further reading, was mentioned, and that predated Doom by 7 years.
And Warcraft came out a month after Doom - close enough to be a contemporary even in a fast-moving field like computer gaming. Warcraft II about a year after Doom 2. Not a contemporary, but pretty close in date.
Oooh, I’m playing that lately. Still runs great on my lousy laptop, too, which is a big plus.
Diablo II is still fun if you’ve got a couple friends and a LAN to play on a couple times a week. None of the idiotic people online, just good gameplay and team play.
My father has been playing Age of Empires (the original) at least three or four hours a week for at least twelve years now.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is still getting updates. There was a new version out a couple weeks ago. Somebody even did a tower defence version I’ve been meaning to try.
There are some other RLs that are in development, but Incursion is the only one that immediately comes to mind. I haven’t played it enough to give a recommendation, though.
RLs have several advantages, such as minimal system requirements, geek cred, and you can start and stop them very quickly, so they’re good if you’re waiting on another program to do something, like a query or updating twenty thousand links in Excel. Game play is distilled. Another thing I like about RLs is that the ASCII versions don’t look like games to the uninitiated. So if at the end of the day I’m killing time at my desk playing Crawl, somebody walking by and make a comment on me doing some programming. This has happened more than once.
I often play old games. I’ve never beaten Diablo II, as in, I’ve never got through the end of Act IV, so I was trying a Fishymancer last night (necro specialized in raise skeletons). I got killed though and I restart when I die.
I picked up Zeus for a buck at the pawn shop the other week and I played that all the way through. I think Pharaoh is probably the best of the Impressions city builder series, and I’m including Children of the Nile, the semi-recent semi-sequel in that. I haven’t played the recent Caesar sequel though. I dusted off Tropico, another builder game, a couple years ago and still found it both fun to play and challenging. I wish somebody would come out with some good new builder games, though.
Rise of Nations and Kohan II are some RTS games that hold up IMO, but I’m not well versed in the genre, and they aren’t really that old.
A buddy of mine mentioned in an email that he’s still playing Heroes of Might and Magic III and I played that one well past the expiration date.
Another genre I like is railroad and transport management. I got Railroad Tycoon Deluxe off an abandonware site and enjoyed it for a while. I don’t remember where I found Transport Tycoon Deluxe but I know didn’t install it off my original copy. Both of those are OK games but I really only played them because I couldn’t find a newer entry into the genre that looked interesting. I believe RTII and III are available on Steam in the US but not in Australia for some reason.
I’m going off topic so I’ll stop.
Nope. But the only reason I heard of Doom is that a few people had tried to play it on work PCs, and it would bring our LAN down to its knees (at least the early version), and there was a big edict that anyone caught running it would be flogged. That was right at the end of my computer game playing career anyway. I briefly tried Doom but it wasn’t interesting. Not like Colossal Cave, or Clyde, or Duke Nukem.
It might not even be half as old as most of the games already mentioned but I still play Age of Empires 2 (1999). It has to be one of my favourite strategy games of all time.
I played Total Annihilation (1997) right up until the release of Supreme Commander too.
The Ultima games, from 4 (1985) onward, are still playable. I actually really liked U9 (1999) but haven’t played it in years.
Starcraft is over 11 years old…
Lords of the Realm II and Conquest of the New World are still great.
Given that I’m playing through the Baldur’s Gate series right now… 
I still play and love Freespace 2 (1999, I believe) and I -really- oughta reinstall Kohan: Ahriman’s Gift (which though older, is IMHO a much better put together game than K2).
Uh. And I still play Everquest. -_-; That’s 11 years old or something too.
BG, and especially Icewind Dale I & II, had fairly limited replay value for me. I don’t think I ever went back to ID, and I only replayed BG a couple of times. BGII, though I played through at least a dozen times.
I’ve been playing Championship Manager 3 all week- 10 years old this year. Wikipedia says it’s incompatible with XP, but it works fine for me- don’t even have to run it in backwards compatibility mode.
I bust out Tachyon every now and then. Bruce Campbell is still good for a laugh, and I like the slightly more linear format (vs. other space shooter/trader sims).
I have a perfectly good copy of Star Wars: Battlefront that I’d like to be playing, but I’ve lost the CD key, which sucks. I do have BF2, which I actually don’t like as much.
I replay HL2 occasionally; never replay HL for some reason.
I also have Civilization 2- now 13 years old- permanently installed, which is handy, because I’ve lost the CD.
ETA: Not a computer game, but I play the original Streets of Rage on GameTap all the time. 18 years old!
Elite.
I was still playing Elite Plus (with the slightly updated graphics) well into the lifetime of my Windows 95 box. No joystick at the moment, or else I might still try and play it today.
I never had one for the BBC Micro. I played it using the keyboard- < and > to roll left and right, W and S for up and down, space bar to fire lasers, number keys for speed, tab for afterburners and Q, E, A, D, Z, X, C for incidental controls (ECM systems and auto-docking and the like).
Have a look at Oolite, then. You might like it. Joystick is not mandatory.
The only old game that counts is one that you can’t play without the old equipment. So, the best are the Horde and Slayer from 3DO.
Did you ever play the King’s Quest or Zork games?
My Civilization CD is stuck in my computer which happens to be in the workshop. (it is under warranty so I wasn’t going to touch it to manually pull it out). I was going insane until I found my Age of Empires (2000) which runs on Windows 98. It is okay but the graphics aren’t great.
Actually the game is very good- I wonder if they do make a version for Vista.