Traditional games cannot iterate because they exist as an agreement by the players, they don't have anybody who "owns" the game to improve it. Notice that in tabletop and modern boardgaming, where they do have a coherent owner, we do see revisions and iterations. If I play Dungeons and Dragons today, or Cosmic Encounter, or Magic the Gathering, it's not the same game as 25 years ago. Not as radically as video games have changed, but still they have evolved because the owners of those games have iterated on them.

To my mind, the non-transient part is that these old games have clear successors that hew very close to their original form that still draw new players. If you want to play Quake, you will find a massive number of games that play very very close to Quake and have active playerbases.