abandonware games sorted by popularity

Fairy Tale Adventure 2: Halls of the Dead (1997) continues its predecessor’s tradition of sprawling fantasy exploration with a darker, more dangerous edge. Available on DOS a...

Stationfall is the follow-up to Infocom’s classic sci-fi adventure, dropping you aboard a deserted space station that is about as welcoming as a hotel with no staff, no electrici...

Hard Hat Mack is the kind of game that proves construction work can be more dangerous in pixels than in real life, provided real life had ladders that seem determined to betray you...

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a criminal economist in 1980s New York, Drug Wars has your fix—pun intended. This early DOS classic throws you into t...

Elegant in concept yet famously demanding in execution, Marble Madness asks players to guide a vulnerable marble through twisting obstacle courses filled with hazards determined to...

Hercules brings mythological heroism into the late 90s with the kind of enthusiasm that only that era could produce. It mixes action and platforming in a way that occasionally feel...

For those who think snooker is too posh and billiards too French, there's Archer Maclean's Pool, the most ‘90s way to simulate the timeless art of arguing over whether that s...

Tapper is what happens when someone gamifies bartending and gives you the reflexes of a caffeinated octopus. You’re a mustachioed bartender juggling multiple counters, pourin...

Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor (1997, Windows XP) took the RTS formula and flipped it into a weird deathmatch where you control a single unit and try not to die... horribly. ...

The Cardinal of the Kremlin turns Tom Clancy's Cold War thriller into a strategy and management experience where international politics are considerably more dangerous than forgett...

Conquest of the New World (Deluxe Edition) invites you to discover new lands, build colonies, and occasionally “accidentally” wipe out entire civilizations while smilin...

Protostar: War on the Frontier is a 1993 science-fiction action strategy game that sends players into a futuristic conflict across space. Players command a powerful spacecraft, exp...

Norton Editor 2 is a text editor built for the DOS environment, aimed at users who needed something more capable than a basic command-line editor without requiring an enormous word...

The Terminator: Future Shock takes the Terminator universe into first-person 3D and does considerably more than simply provide another excuse to shoot robots. Set in a devastated f...

WinFrotz is a Windows implementation of Frotz, an interpreter designed to run classic Infocom-style interactive fiction using Z-machine story files. Instead of providing one specif...

By the time Lords of Midnight: The Citadel arrived in 1995, it carried the weight of a classic on its shoulders. Rather than reinventing the original, it refines and reinterprets i...

Port Royale is a 2002 trading and strategy game that lets players experience the life of a merchant in the Caribbean during the age of sailing ships. Instead of becoming a legendar...

F-15 Strike Eagle II takes everything that made the original a classic and cranks it up like a jet engine at full throttle. The visuals are sharper, the missions are more varied, a...

A fresh beginning for the series, Mega Man X modernizes the classic formula with faster movement, wall climbing, hidden upgrades, and a darker science fiction storyline. The expand...

Impulse Tracker was a popular music tracker software developed by Jeffrey Lim in the late 1990s. Impulse Tracker utilized a tracker-style user interface, which was common in t...

Nippon Safes, Inc. is a 1992 adventure game with a distinctly European sense of humor and a story involving criminals, schemes, and people who probably should have chosen more resp...

Math was never supposed to be this exciting. In Number Munchers, you’re a green blob with an appetite for multiplication tables, gobbling up correct answers while dodging &ld...

Grand Prix 500 2 throws you onto a motorcycle and politely suggests you try not to die at high speed. Unlike car racing games, this one reminds you that two wheels are inherently a...

Metal Gear introduces the legendary Solid Snake to computer players in a stealth adventure built around infiltration rather than brute force. Sneaking past guards, gathering intell...

Back in 1983, IBM Centipede brought arcade bug-blasting straight to home computers, allowing office machines to moonlight as insect exterminators. This adaptation of the arcade cla...

The Amazon Trail is an educational adventure that sends you down the Amazon River with considerably less certainty about what you are doing than the title might suggest. Released i...

Ultima 8 drops the Avatar into a grim, volcanic world where “fun” is defined as plummeting to your death from badly timed jumps. Yes, the infamous platforming mechanics...

Sid Meier's Covert Action is a 1990 DOS espionage game that throws players into the glamorous world of international spying, where gathering information is only slightly less dange...

In Commander Keen 5: The Armageddon Machine, Keen infiltrates a massive space station engineered to obliterate planets like it’s swatting flies. This is Keen at his most tech...

Neverwinter Nights is a 1991 role-playing game set in the Forgotten Realms, long before the later title of the same name became famous for its powerful multiplayer tools and moddin...