Why Are These Old Roblox Games Still Alive?

16 min readJan 13, 2026

My Personal Beginning

Let me tell you something. I am by no means one of those people who registered a Roblox account in 2006 and acts like a boomer about it. Mine was 2012 — except I mostly played as a guest and then forgot my own account password. The first game I ever actually experienced was Welcome to Town of Robloxia.

I found Roblox through YouTube videos of people making their own so-called “Machinimas.” Hell, I still remember my old fat white South Korean computer from 2003 running Windows XP. I was hooked by the blocky look of the characters, which reminded me of LEGO or Minecraft itself — even though Minecraft was significantly younger, which somehow didn’t stop children from starting unusual wars over which one was better.

Some time passed, I forgot Roblox existed, then I came back in 2016 as a guest and finally registered my account in January 2017.

A lot of games come to mind that used to sit on the front page back when Roblox still had the old red-and-white R logo — before 2017. Some of them aren’t exactly gone, just quieter: Roblox High School, Hotel Elephant by Paulo, LAZER, The Normal Elevator by NowDoTheHarlemShake, Khols Admin House, Robloxian Life.

But a few classics are still genuinely popular today, even nearly ten years after I made my account. Those are the ones I’m covering here — games that are still active and thriving, and some of which will probably outlast all of us as players.

By the end, we’ll have figured out why these games are still played and what keeps people coming back to them.

1. Murder Mystery 2

As if it weren’t obvious enough, Murder Mystery 2 is a certified hood classic — pretty much everyone knows it. If you somehow haven’t heard of it, you’re likely a modern Roblox player spending your time on an iPad in Adopt Me, which somehow still pulls in 100–200k players.

Under a different title, Murder Mystery was created and launched by Nikilis on January 18, 2014. It was based on a Garry’s Mod gamemode called Murder, and it inspired other murder-round games after it, like Mad Murder by Loleris.

Sooner or later Nikilis renamed it to Murder Mystery 2 on December 25, 2014 — version 2.0. By February 2017 it had become the most visited game on the platform, passing 500 million visits. Mad wild, considering it was only three years old. It didn’t hold the top spot long, though — Meep City took over soon after and beat MM2 by a wide margin.

Gameplay Mechanics and Objectives

One server holds up to 12 players: 1 murderer, 1 sheriff, and up to 10 innocents. There are three playable roles — Sheriff, Murderer, Innocent — and originally three modes: Casual, Hardcore, and Assassin. Players can switch modes at any time. You can also collect coins to buy crates, powers, effects, emotes, radios, pets.

Sheriff — Eliminate the murderer before the round ends and before the murderer kills everyone, including you. Do that, and you and the surviving innocents win. Fail, and you lose.

Murderer — The objective is obvious: kill everyone before the round ends, using a knife that can also be thrown. Killing the sheriff doesn’t end the round — only wiping out every player does.

Innocents — Survive until the round ends. If the murderer kills the sheriff, an innocent can pick up the revolver and finish the job.

The game has plenty of maps, even if a large portion were discontinued. Many are still playable. Those are:

Bank 2, Biolab, Hospital 1–3, Hotel 2, House 2, Mansion 2, and a lot more I won’t get into, because each one deserves its own paragraph.

Critiques and Impact

The game had a massive impact on the platform — spawning fan games with permission, plus numerous spin-offs. The most notable example is Hypixel taking inspiration from MM2 and building their own near-identical gamemode.

That’s nothing unusual, given how many existing games Hypixel’s modes were built on top of. It’s the Quentin Tarantino approach: combine multiple inspirations and scenes into something that reads as yours. Same phenomenon as Steal Like an Artist.

The biggest criticism is the lack of new content — basically for years. Despite enormous revenue, there hasn’t been meaningful development in eight or nine years. What you get instead are reskinned holiday events repeating every Christmas in December and Easter in April, plus new microtransactions.

Instead of adding a few genuinely interesting maps, classic ones got deleted or discontinued. To long-time players that felt like an insult — erasing history and the nostalgia they actually cared about. Beyond the update drought, MM2 catches flak for its radios, odd glitches, and biased behavior, like killers teaming up with friends (a killer clears the whole server except their buddy), which makes matches feel rigged.

There’s also a real lack of polish. That said, the community eventually made peace with some of the glitches and now treats them as part of the game’s texture — almost a feature that adds depth.

Legacy

MM2 essentially created the modern Roblox virtual-item trading economy. The knife-collecting obsession that drives its revenue is the blueprint for how almost every Roblox game since has monetized. Adopt Me’s pets, Pet Simulator’s eggs — they all borrow MM2’s loot-box-plus-trading model. Strip it down and the game is “digital tag with a murder theme and loot boxes,” but it proved that model works at scale.

It also codified a genre. MM2 didn’t just inspire fan games; it defined what “Murder Mystery” means on Roblox. One murderer, one sheriff, N innocents became the default template, and Hypixel borrowed it directly for Minecraft. The influence went well past Roblox into broader gaming culture.

The 500 million visit milestone in 2017 deserves context too. Half a billion visits in three years was unprecedented for a user-created game at the time. It was arguably the first Roblox title to prove that a simple, loop-driven game could out-earn complex tycoon and roleplay experiences.

2. Natural Disaster Survival

Here we are, at this simple, generic-looking gem that means far more to me than it probably should. Back in 2016 and 2017 this was one of my very first Roblox games, and I had the most fun with it on a guest account before guests were removed in 2017.

Natural Disaster Survival is a round-based survival game by Stickmasterluke, a classic and well-known developer. Before NDS he was fairly known for Underground Wars, a dead classic from the old 2000s Roblox era that we won’t be getting into here.

Before it became Natural Disaster Survival, the place was a warehouse shared by two different games from March 2008 to November 2011. It was later retitled Disaster Testing, and the full release happened on December 4, 2011.

At that point it had only 8 maps and 6 disasters. Shortly after launch, the Arch Park and Raving Raceway maps were added. Then nothing until 2014, which feels strange… or does it? Considering there aren’t that many real-life natural disasters you can name, maybe there isn’t much to build beyond the simplicity that already exists in real life.

The one update that drew real controversy came during COVID in 2020, when a virus was added later that year. It didn’t affect the map, only players, if someone got randomly infected. Fans point out the pandemic disaster was planned years before COVID, which complicates the “edgy cash-grab update” reading.

Game mechanics and objectives

It’s been a long time since I played, because it got repetitive the more I played and the older I got. You start Roblox normally and spawn in the round lobby, which sits very high in the sky with water far below.

Look around a bit and you’ll spot the round grass-and-dirt map down below — I don’t know how many studs away, but it’s a long way down. Very likely the round is already running unless you’ve landed in a server with exactly one person in it.

Around January 2014, five more disasters arrived: Earthquake, Volcanic Eruption, Sandstorm, Blizzard, and Acid Rain, plus Coastal Quickstop. Other additions included a Global Servers Leaderboard and random Double Disasters, where two disasters hit in the same round.

That last one got removed two years later. Shortly after came the red apple update. The red apple heals you when you eat it, as if that wasn’t obvious — what else would you use it for?

Beyond that, the only updates worth expecting are more maps. From 2016 through 2021 they added a weather machine, disaster warnings, and maps like Lucky Mart, Party Palace, Heights School, and Furious Station.

The game also took part in one of Roblox’s biggest events, primarily Egg Hunt, which it appeared in from roughly 2012 until 2020–21. It was also in week 2 of Metaverse Champions, representing Wren Brightblade. That came with an Rthro bundle and an NPC: players had to survive three disasters in a row to earn the Wren Metaverse Champion Chest #2, which opened into Wren’s Recurve Bow of Recreation.

Critiques and Impact

Like MM2, NDS left a long-term mark on the platform. The critiques tend to come from its own still-active players, and they usually land on four things.

Repetitiveness and no progression. This is the single most common complaint, and it matches a lot of people’s experience. There’s “absolutely nothing to make you want to grind” — no leveling, no earnable items beyond badges — so there’s no hook past the first few rounds. One commenter put the retention problem bluntly:

“It is in desperate need of an update, surprised it ain’t dead”

The social lobby effect. Much of the current player base isn’t really playing. Regulars describe friends logging on “just to afk their avatar and chat with homies,” using the scoreboard for easy status since winning takes little to no effort. NDS survives less as a game than as a third place — a persistent room where the disaster is background noise.

Exploiters and moderation. The 2025 state-of-play threads are dominated by complaints about hackers flying around with gravity rings and killing people in the lobby. Players blame a game that’s effectively unmoderated while “updates come out every 6 years.”

Technical stagnation as the cause. Dataminers who cracked open the place file found the main script runs 2,000+ lines and is nearly unreadable, which plausibly explains why Stickmasterluke goes years between updates. So that “no updates since 2014” gap we noticed isn’t laziness — it’s legacy code.

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The counter-argument is that the simplicity is also the defense. Review testing in 2025 still rated it highly because it runs smoothly on almost every device, including low-end mobile, and the creator keeps patching exploits while preserving the original charm.

Trivia: The iconic main island you play on wasn’t even built by creator Stickmasterluke — it was made by Amura.

Legacy

Before NDS, “survival” on Roblox mostly meant BrickBattle-style PvP or open-ended building. What Stickmasterluke assembled was a specific loop, and once he nailed it, almost everything that followed reused it.

It defined a genre. NDS codified round-based survival on Roblox and launched the build-to-survive / disaster-survival subgenre that dominated the platform for years — Build to Survive and Apocalypse Rising competed in the space it created.

It’s also a longevity benchmark: one of a handful of pre-2012 games still pulling 10,000+ concurrent players into the mid-2020s, still optimized for every device. And my guest-account detail is actually useful analysis here — the 2017 guest removal permanently changed NDS’s audience, because guests were a huge share of its casual player base.

Then there’s preservation culture. Copycat projects like RETROBLOX’s 2012-styled NDS exist and get taken down over copylock rules, which tells you how much nostalgia value the original holds. Add the Roblox events — Egg Hunt from roughly 2012 through 2020–21, then the Metaverse Champions tie-in where you survive three disasters for the Recurve Bow of Recreation — and it’s clear Roblox itself treats NDS as heritage IP worth spotlighting.

3. Work at a Pizza Place

Work at a Pizza Place primary known thumbnail

Look, here we are, at a pizza restaurant that’s been serving the same pepperoni since 2009. No wait — 2007, if you count the Krusty Krab. This is the oldest game on the list that still has roughly 8,000 players on a random Tuesday night, and it’s been doing that for nearly two decades.

Work at a Pizza Place started life as Work at a Krusty Krab, a direct SpongeBob SquarePants ripoff, before getting pulled in early-to-mid 2008 over copyright concerns. Dued1 (real name Michael Sligh, joined Roblox October 26, 2007) rebuilt it from scratch in January 2009 under the new name, and it’s been the same loop ever since.

You pick a job, you make pizza, you drive it over, you go home and buy a couch. That’s the whole game. And yet this little simulation is the reason every roleplay game on the platform exists. The shop itself is called Builder Brothers Pizza — formerly “Hot and Fresh Pizza Pizza” until a 2014 copyright rename — and the soda in the fridge is Fizzly, which was Mountain Dew before someone got a lawyer involved.

The only surviving Krusty Krab footage is a video titled “Dued1’s Krusty Krab Hacked” from November 18, 2007, showing what looks like a badly corrupted server. After the takedown, the place ID (202968) cycled through several other Dued1 experiences — Sniper City, Survive the Killer — before the Pizza Place remake took over in January 2009. It hit the front page almost immediately, reaching up to 300 concurrent players in its earliest days.

If that means anything to you: the in-game Krusty Krab easter egg, now called Work at a Burger Place, is still accessible by driving out into the ocean and hunting for a miniature Krusty Krab build under the map, or through Dued1’s profile. Dued1 himself describes it as “my 2015 Roblox intern project that I never finished.”

Game mechanics and objectives

You spawn at the pizza restaurant. There are six jobs:

Cashier (takes orders, processes them),

Cook (assembles pizzas on the table, puts them in the oven),

Pizza Boxer (boxes the cooked pizzas and hands them to delivery),

Delivery Driver (drives the pizza to the customer’s house within a time limit).

Supplier (restocks ingredients via a conveyor system),

Manager (oversees operations, assigns tasks)

A seventh “role” is simply being unemployed: sitting at your house, customizing, or doing nothing. My favorite by far, and I say that without sarcasm.

The core loop is: complete your job → earn coins → spend them on your house. Every player is automatically given a house on first join, and it saves permanently. You can paint the walls, roof, doors, and windows, and place furniture from the in-game Catalog.

House upgrades go: Shack (default) → Tiny (100 coins) → Small (1,200) → Two Story (14,900) → Backyard (40,000) → Basement (45,000 or 730 Robux) → Mansion (200,000 or 1,700 Robux) → Estate (600,000 or 4,200 Robux). The Estate has nearly twice the floor space of the Mansion, a giant garage, and furniture placement outside the house.

There’s also The Dump, a second shop where a character called Mr. Builder sells discounted catalog items, rare items, and locked items that unlock new catalog entries. This gives the furniture system a rougher, more lived-in layer than a clean store would.

The driving mechanics have been consistently praised across the game’s entire lifespan — the cars feel weighted and responsive in a way that most Roblox vehicles never achieved. This is, arguably, the single most “gamey” thing about an otherwise social game.

Pets existed first named as “Zoobers” from 2015 to 2023, then were redesigned into the current “New Pets” system in 2023. Pets give passive boosts (e.g., Oven IV for cooks) and can be equipped in an inventory slot.

Unlike NDS’s multi-year gaps, WAAPP has been updated consistently, though the cadence has shifted. The 2025–2026 era is defined by:

Seasonal re-runs on a yearly cycle: Easter Egg Hunt, Halloween…

The Takeover Event (Sept 12–22, 2025): an official Roblox event with multi-stage delivery challenges (increased speed, weightlessness, lava floors)

The Hunt: ROBLOX 20 (Sept 17–28, 2026): a time-travel quest where Brick and Tony Builder have been erased from history, Pineapple has replaced Sausage, and you must recover the secret recipe. Badges: “Recipe Retribution” and “S05”

Critiques and impact

The critiques that come up most often usually come from former fans, and they tend to fall into four buckets.

Repetitiveness / it’s just a real job. A February 2026 Reddit thread was titled “Why Is Everyone In Work At A Pizza Place So Incompetent?” and it captures the core frustration for a lot of people. There are never any cashiers. The whole server decides to be cooks who put plain dough (or themselves) in the oven and then throw your pizzas on the floor. It feels like an actual job. “I used to play Work at a Pizza Place, then I afforded the mansion and got bored afterward. The gameplay can get stale.”

Trolling and social friction. The wiki’s own Troller Problem page lists the common tactics: snowballing and dragging customers out of the shop, job-stealing, vehicle theft, deliberate supply-chain sabotage. One supplier player put it this way: “It takes the joy out of working as a supplier, which is my favourite job in the game.” The game has no meaningful moderation tools on this part beyond only server-hopping.

Graphics stagnation. WoodReviewer, who has done an annual “wood grain review” of the game since 2016, notes that the same bad wood grain on the restaurant chairs, pizza table, and sign posts has been unfixed for nine years. As he said at some point:

I mean, I could probably find more if I went through all the furniture and house stuff, but that would be a job for next years review. Hopefully by then these issues will be addressed. But after the last 6 years I wouldn’t be holding my breath.

Cash-grind tedium. The progression to Estate costs 600,000 coins. For a player who doesn’t have friends to coordinate with, the loop of cooking, boxing, and delivering to slowly fill a house can feel like actual minimum-wage work.

Counter-critique: the 92.9% like ratio (3.4 million likes against 263,000 dislikes) and the fact that 12-player servers are consistently full suggests the core experience still works. The simplicity is the point — it’s a social space with a shared activity, not a game with a difficulty curve. Dued1 keeps patching and adding seasonal content, which is more than most pre-2010 games can say.

Legacy

Genre-defining. WAAPP codified structured-role simulation on Roblox and launched the “pick a job, earn money, decorate your house” template that dominated the platform for over a decade. Almost everything that came after is a variation on this loop. Brookhaven RP, Livetopia, Welcome to Bloxburg — they all borrow the house-customization-plus-shared-activity structure that started here. The house, the catalog, the job rotation, the post-shift hangout: none of it existed as a package before November 2007.

Longevity benchmark. It was the first Roblox game to hit 100 million visits (January 2016), the fourth to hit 1 billion (October 2018), and sits at 5.6 billion with 13 million+ favorites as of mid-2026. More importantly, it’s still pulling 8,000–20,000 concurrent players on random Tuesday nights nearly two decades after release, still receiving seasonal updates and new furniture, still optimized for low-end mobile. That’s not a monument; that’s a business.

Platform history marker. The Krusty Krab → Pizza Place rebrand is one of the earliest examples of IP enforcement reshaping a Roblox game’s identity. The fact that the original is preserved as a drivable easter egg under the ocean, with a full YouTube video of the hacked 2007 server still circulating, gives it a lost-media quality that newer games simply don’t have.

Preservation culture. The place ID (202968) cycled through at least three unrelated Dued1 experiences before the Pizza Place remake took over in January 2009, which means the “original” is already a reconstruction. The Krusty Krab easter egg is, in Dued1’s own words, “my 2015 Roblox intern project that I never finished.” The community treats both the 2007 original and the 2009 remake as sacred text, and the fact that the game’s own wiki has a dedicated “Troller Problem” page shows how much lived-in history has accumulated in a single place file.

Roblox events. The game participates in official Roblox events — The Hunt: ROBLOX 20, The Takeover, Egg Hunt, Christmas — alongside titles that are a decade or more its junior. That’s not nostalgia curation; it’s Roblox treating WAAPP as active, current IP worth spotlighting in its own marketing.

Conclusion

The “will never die” trio — Work at a Pizza Place, Natural Disaster Survival, and Murder Mystery 2 — is the closest thing the platform has to a permanent canonical set, and it’s not a coincidence that all three predate the guest removal, the economy overhaul, and the mobile phone boom, with aprox. 83% of players coming from their own mobile smart phones.

They survived the three biggest shifts in Roblox history and came out the other side still running well. Not because they were perfect games, but because they got something fundamentally right.

A loop simple enough to pick up in thirty seconds, social enough to give you a reason to come back tomorrow, and flexible enough to absorb decades of cultural change without breaking.

That’s worth remembering, especially now that Roblox is trying to become everything to everyone, appealing towards everyone in existence. Sometimes the games that last the longest are the ones that never tried to be more than what they already were in its own roots.