The most popular abandonware action games

If you like your justice loud and messy, Crime Wave delivers. It’s a side-scrolling shooter set in a dystopian future where the only way to keep order is with a hail of bulle...

Dangerous Dave is the kind of platformer that defined the early ’90s shareware scene: simple, fast, and just tricky enough to make you shout at your monitor. You guide Dave t...

By the time Earthworm Jim hit DOS, its reputation already preceded it, and it largely lived up to the hype. This is a platformer that thrives on absurdity: a worm in a spacesuit, b...

Time Bandit is a classic top-down arcade-style video game that was released in 1982 for various home computer systems, such as the Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and others. It was dev...

X-Men: Children of the Atom is a fighting video game developed by Capcom and released in arcades in 1994. The game features characters from Marvel Comics' X-Men series, including p...

Snake Logan is back, and this time the lab is... hidden! The Hidden Lab cranks up the challenge with more grotesque mutants, more lethal traps, and slightly improved sarcasm. It&rs...

If holiday cheer could be bottled into pixels, HappyLand Adventures: X-mas Edition would probably come with a candy cane aftertaste and a mild sugar rush. This cheerful platformer ...

In Bionic Commando, you're a soldier with no jumping ability—because who needs knees when you have a grappling arm? Swing through 1988 DOS architecture like a pixelated Tarza...

Released in 1983, Moon Patrol is the game that proved moon driving is a terrible career choice. You control a buggy with a suspension system that would make NASA jealous, jumping o...

Dangerous Dave: Risky Rescue puts Dave back in hero mode, diving into a dangerous compound to rescue his brother. Expect tight platforming, unpredictable enemy patterns, and traps ...

Billy’s babysitter has been abducted by aliens, and he’s not having it. Commander Keen 6: Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter! is the series at its most Saturday-morning-cartoon ...

Before Keen went full-on galactic hero, he had a Keen Dreams. Literally. This midquel drops him in a dreamscape ruled by King Boobus Tuber (yes, really), where vegetables are evil ...

A martial arts tournament starring fluffy animals with serious anger issues? Yes, please. Brutal: Paws of Fury is what happens when someone watches too much kung fu cinema and then...

In a world where fish can apparently become cybernetic superheroes, James Pond 2: Codename: RoboCod makes perfect sense. Released for DOS in 1993, this platformer stars the aquatic...

Horror Zombies from the Crypt sounds like it should be terrifying, but in practice it leans more toward quirky than genuinely scary. Released in 1990, it mixes action and adventure...

Commander Keen 1: Marooned on Mars is a platform video game developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software in 1990 as shareware for MS-DOS. The game follows the adv...

The trilogy concludes in Master Cain, where Snake Logan faces the ultimate evil: a villain with a name that sounds like a Bond bad guy and a plan straight from Saturday morning car...

The Miami Vice game developed by Capstone Software and released in 1989 for MS-DOS was an action-strategy game based on the popular TV show. Unlike other arcade-style adaptations, ...

Q*bert is a classic arcade game that was created by Warren Davis and Jeff Lee and was released by Gottlieb in 1982. The main goal of Qbert is to change the color of every...

Ah, 3D-Maze. If you used Windows 3.x, you probably saw this lurking in the corner of your screen savers like a digital minotaur. Released in 1991, it’s not quite a game, but ...

Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president? If that line doesn’t make you want to punch a ninja through a hotdog stand, nothing will. Bad Dudes VS Dragon Ninja is peak...

Electroman is a cheerful little platformer with a big grin and zero interest in realism. You play as a cartoonish superhero zipping through levels full of gadgets, traps, and enemi...

Colorado (1990, DOS) drops you into the buckskin boots of a rugged frontiersman navigating the Wild West with guns, canoes, and questionable hygiene. Equal parts action and explora...

From the dusty archives of 1995 DOS gaming comes Zorro, a side-scrolling platformer that asks the question: what if the legendary masked hero had the reflexes of a hungover sloth? ...

Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone (1992) is what happens when a simple beat-’em-up decides to go globetrotting. Instead of just brawling through alleys, Billy and Jimmy trav...

Pac-in-Time is an abandoned action side-scrolling platformer game developed by Kalisto Entertainment and released by Mindscape in 1993 for DOS. Pac-in-time was but also published f...