abandonware games sorted by popularity

Apollo 18: Mission to the Moon (1987) lets you relive the lunar missions in all their... spreadsheet-like glory. This game is as educational as it is punishing; you’ll learn about thrust vectors, fuel efficiency, and your to...

Conqueror is what happens when a tank simulator and an arcade game go on a date and forget their purpose. You drive a tank in a pseudo-3D landscape, blow up stuff, and command squads like a battlefield conductor with no baton. It&...

Ascii Sector is what happens when someone takes Privateer, removes the graphics, and replaces them with pure ASCII and sheer willpower. It’s open-world space sim meets roguelike: you trade, fight, explore, get stabbed in sha...

Borland Reflex was a relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by Borland International, a software company that was prominent in the 1980s and 1990s. Reflex was released in the mid-1980s as a graphical database soft...

Astro Dodge (1982) is basically Frogger — in space. You control a tiny spacecraft tasked with dodging endless waves of meteors, space debris, and possibly your own questionable life choices. There’s no shooting, no exp...

TomeNET (Troubles of Middle Earth, Net) is an online, multiplayer rogue-like game set in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth. It’s a persistent-world game inspired by Angband, a single-player dungeon-crawler based on ...

Part interactive novel, part point-and-click adventure, Daughter of Serpents (1992) is one of those games that makes you feel like you stumbled onto a forgotten pulp novel. Set in 1920s Alexandria, it’s dripping with mystery...

Hot on the heels of the first, Caverns of Kroz 2 (also 1989) doesn’t mess with the formula—it sharpens it. More puzzles, more monsters, more reasons to scream at falling rocks. The whip’s still your best friend, ...

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, dodging seals, and leaping over yawning crevasses while ...

ATAC (1992) is what you get when someone says, “What if we made SimCity, but for waging the War on Drugs?” You play as the head of an anti-narcotics task force, deploying units, tracking smugglers, and launching airstr...

Chaos Overlords is a cyberpunk-themed strategy game developed by Stick Man Games and published by New World Computing in 1996. Set in a dystopian future, the game focuses on controlling the underworld of a city dominated by corrup...

Dungeon Keeper 3: War for the Overworld is the ghost of a game that never was. Announced, teased, and then buried alive by shifting studio priorities, it exists only in the fever dreams of fans. Concept art promised new realms, bi...

Ah, Black Sect (1993), where the puzzles are cryptic, the villagers are creepy, and the atmosphere is so thick you could spread it on toast. A classic first-person point-and-click adventure, it has that early '90s Euro-horror vibe...