The veteran zombie survival game “7 Days to Die” has been released from Early Access after more than 11 1/2 years on Steam. This was back when Miley Cyrus' “Wrecking Ball” was on the charts and Barack Obama was President of the United States. The game, now “finished,” includes new high-resolution character models, a new system of player armor and clothing, new animal models, a new challenge system replacing tutorials and quests, new vehicle models, a succession of randomly generated world improvements, over 75 new exploration points, new zombie model variations, character progression tweaks, updated lighting, and many, many optimizations to the game code have been added.

7 Days to Die is a first-person zombie survival crafting game in a sandbox world designed to be destructible, seamless, and buildable anywhere. Its basic philosophy may sound almost outdated now, but it was the cutting edge of what was thought to be possible when it was first released in 2013. Whether it's still good or not is anyone's guess, but recent Steam reviews have given it a favorable fan rating of about 83%.

7 Days to Die first appeared in Steam's Early Access in December 2013, and if my dates are correct, it has been about 11 years, 7 months and 13 days since Early Access. Of the mega-hit games that appeared in the first wave, Project Zomboid is probably the only one that is still in Early Access and still in active development.

“7 Days to Die” was in Early Access for so long that it was released by defunct game publisher Telltale on the no longer current generation of consoles, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. To the developer's credit, legacy owners of these consoles are offered discounts to repurchase on the current console generation.

7 Days to Die can be found on Steam, with an app ID of 251570.

Early Access as a model has evolved significantly since it was first proposed; no matter what the criticism of a game like 7 Days to Die, Early Access has become a way to fund long-term open development after the initial buzz of release has died down. and while games like “7 Days to Die” may have once been much smaller in scale or lost funding within the first few years of development, the early access model has given them development times on par with the most established MMOs.