abandonware games sorted by popularity

Innocent Until Caught throws you into a sci-fi noir universe where your protagonist, a perpetually broke thief, stumbles from one disaster to the next with a mix of charm, sarcasm,...

In the Dead of Night is one of those mid-90s DOS oddities that feels like it crawled straight out of a programmer’s personal nightmares. Part adventure, part horror, and part...

Race Drivin' is a 1990 arcade racing game developed and published by Atari Games.  It's the sequel to Hard Drivin' (1989) and retains the same stunt-based driving mechanics wh...

Forget Peter Jackson’s version. CHAMP Kong brings the big ape back to his pixelated roots, where ladders were death traps and barrels were pure evil. This charming homage to ...

Aka Starglider 2 with an attitude, Revenge of Defender (or Defender of the Crown’s evil twin in name only) is a 3D space shooter where your main enemy is not the aliens&mdash...

The title Alex Higgins World Snooker might imply world-class snooker. What it delivers is 1986 DOS ball physics that sometimes feel like they were modeled in an alternate dimension...

Eternam is a gloriously strange hybrid of 3D exploration, adventure puzzles, and comedic sci-fi. You play Don Jonzon, a man just trying to enjoy a vacation—only to end up cha...

Arnhem is the kind of wargame where you spend more time reading hex maps than shooting anything. It’s all about recreating Operation Market Garden — you know, that WWII...

Slipstream 5000 is a futuristic racing video game that was released in 1995 for MS-DOS. It was developed by The Software Refinery and published by Gremlin Interactive. The game is ...

Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O'Fun, released in 1989 for DOS, is a platformer that looks cheerful but hides a surprisingly mean streak. Set in a circus filled with traps, clowns, and ...

Goal! is one of those football games that reminds you how far sports simulations have come—and how much fun they were before realism took over. The controls are simple, the p...

Ishar 2 (1994, DOS) picks up where the first game left off, and then throws in more ways to punish careless adventurers. It’s a first-person RPG where managing your party isn...

Imagine Tetris but in three dimensions and your brain slowly melting into a puddle of confusion. That is Blockout. You drop 3D shapes into a pit and try to line them up, but nothin...

By 1989, Dragon’s Lair had already become legendary in arcades, so its DOS port had a lot to live up to. Spoiler: it couldn’t quite match the arcade’s gorgeous la...