abandonware games sorted by popularity

If you like your RPGs verbose, Betrayal at Krondor is basically a fantasy novel you play. Set in Raymond E. Feist’s Midkemia, the game oozes with narrative depth, detailed ch...

With a title like Dogfight: 80 Years of Aerial Warfare, you know you’re in for a serious history lesson disguised as a game. Released in 1993, this DOS flight sim spans decad...

Uridium is a fast-paced shooter from 1988 that wastes no time getting you into the action. You’ll be piloting a sleek craft across massive enemy ships, blasting anything that get...

Back in 1989, David Wolf: Secret Agent tried really hard to make you feel like James Bond. You get car chases, fistfights, and enough cheesy dialogue to fill an action movie marath...

American Conquest is the kind of game that throws hundreds of little soldiers at you and says, "Good luck, General!" Set during the early colonization of the Americas, this RTS ble...

Epic Pinball is what happens when a small team says, “Sure, let’s make a pinball game,” and accidentally creates one of the most addictive shareware hits of the d...

The name screams “budget shareware,” and Bubble Pop delivers. It’s the digital equivalent of popping bubble wrap, except someone decided it needed high scores and...

In Ancients 1: Deathwatch, you gather your pixelated party and set off to cleanse a city of evil, or at least try not to get mugged by slimes. It's a dungeon crawler in classic DOS...

Back in 1987, Crazy Cars asked the eternal question: how fast can you go before the road becomes an abstract blur? Armed with a sleek sports car and the confidence of someone who&r...

Warheads is a turn-based artillery game in the grand tradition of blowing your friends to pieces with ridiculous weapons. You control a team of tiny, heavily armed soldiers and tak...

The Cycles: International Grand Prix Racing is a motorcycle racing simulation game developed and published by Accolade in 1989. The game is part of the wave of realistic racing sim...

If Rambo had a twin brother who preferred hiding behind sandbags and tossing grenades like candy, Cabal would be his biography. This over-the-top shooter puts you in the boots of a...

Frederik Pohl’s Gateway is science fiction that doesn’t hold your hand—or particularly care if you survive. Based on Pohl’s novel, this 1992 adventure drops...

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...

Think you're smart? Arcade Trivia Quiz (1993) is here to humble you with rapid-fire questions about pop culture, history, and whatever else the developers could fit on a floppy dis...

Ah yes, Air Trax from 1983 - a game where “flight” is more of a philosophical concept. It’s clunky, it's slow, and it looks like it was coded in someone’s g...

Long before “quiet quitting” became a buzzword, Dilbert’s Desktop Games captured the soul-crushing absurdity of office life. Released for Windows XP in 1997, this...

In Black Crown (1995), you play as a prince with a very punchable name, trying to reclaim his rightful throne by solving puzzles and dying a lot. It's one of those DOS-era games wh...

DX-Ball 2 is a popular brick-breaking game that was first released in 1998 by Longbow Digital Arts. It serves as a sequel to the original DX-Ball, which was inspired by the classic...

Antarctic Adventure (1986) stars a penguin who seems to be training for the Winter Olympics — at full sprint. This early Konami game has you racing across icy terrain, dodgin...

Ultimuh MCMLXVII: Part 2 of the 39th Trilogy wins points immediately for its audacious title alone. This action-adventure leans heavily into sci-fi weirdness, combining philosophic...

High Command: Europe 1939-45 is a strategy game that does not shy away from complexity, asking players to engage with history on a grand scale. The mechanics are detailed, sometime...

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...

In Annals of Rome, you don’t just play history — you command it, badly. This 1988 strategy title lets you take control of the Roman Empire and try to keep it from falli...