The best abandonware sports games

If you’ve ever wondered what professional wrestling would look like if it were coded on a calculator from the 1980s, Tag Team Wrestling has your answer. Two beefy sprites&mda...

Unnecessary Roughness takes American football and gives it a slightly rougher, more arcade-like edge. Released in 1993, it doesn’t aim for pure simulation, instead focusing on fa...

Ah, Championship Manager 93, the game that taught us yelling at pixels is a valid emotional outlet. It's you, a keyboard, and a list of players with stamina ratings. No fancy graph...

By the time Premier Manager 3 rolled around, the series had cemented its reputation as the thinking fan’s football fix. Released in 1994, it refined the formula once again, o...

Hockey League Simulator takes the thrilling, bone-crunching sport of hockey and boldly asks: what if you never actually played it? Instead, you manage teams, tweak stats, and stare...

In Street Sports Basketball (1987, DOS), forget polished courts and referees—this is basketball played between garages, with trash cans as sidelines and pride on the line. Th...

Tennis Cup offers a surprisingly nuanced take on tennis, with mechanics that go beyond simply hitting the ball back and forth. Timing, positioning, and spin all play a role, giving...

What happens when a basketball game forgets about realism and goes full cartoon? Basket Master (1990), that’s what. This Spanish-developed DOS gem pits two oddly animated bal...

Released in 1990, Disc feels like a relic from a parallel universe where Frisbee is the most important sport in history. The game is minimalist to a fault: you throw discs, catch d...

It’s cyber. It’s puck. It’s… basically cyberpunk air hockey with attitude. 3D Cyberpuck is a futuristic sport simulation from 1992 that nobody asked for, y...

Sensible Golf is a golf video game developed by Sensible Software and published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment. It was released in 1994 for Amiga and MS-DOS.Unlike traditional...

Arcade Pool (1994) is like playing a game of billiards in your best friend’s basement—if your best friend happened to be a DOS machine with a serious competitive streak...

Five-a-side Indoor Soccer is what happens when football trades muddy boots for squeaky sneakers and decides walls are friends, not boundaries. Released in the mid-80s, it captures ...

IBM 9-Hole Miniature Golf from 1983 proves that even the earliest PC games understood the timeless joy of smacking a tiny ball toward disappointment. It is exactly what it promises...