After more than 20 years of development, Dwarf Fortress will release this year

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The management game phenomenon is out next month

Dwarf Fortress
(Image credit: Kitfox Games)

Dwarf Fortress, the management-game phenomenon more than 20 years in the making, finally has a release date.

Earlier today, publisher Kitfox Games confirmed that the Dwarf Fortress release date is now set for December 6, more than two decades after developer Tarn Adams initially began work on the project in October 2002. Back then, Adams expected the project to take two months to build, but his intricate development style has meant that he and his older brother Zach have been working on Dwarf Fortress for far, far longer than that.

Until today, the Dwarf Fortress release date was a mystery. In fact, the 'release date' section of the game's Steam page simply said that "time is subjective," a nod to the suggestion that the game would arrive when it's ready. After 20 years, however, it seems unlikely that the Adams brothers are completely done with the game - a press kit still says that there's "no end in sight" for the project.

Dwarf Fortress will be dropping on Steam and Itch.io, complete with overhauled graphics and new tutorials to make the notoriously complex game more accessible. While the official 1.0 release is on its way, the Adams' efforts have been playable for a long time, allowing generations of dwarfs to dig and die in the endlessly sprawling dungeons of this almost-impossibly ambitious game. In its 20-year history, it's helped shape modern management games like RimWorld and Prison Architect, and generate some of the wildest, most sprawling player narratives in games.

Ali Jones
Ali Jones
Managing Editor, News

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for news, shaping the news strategy across the team. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.