abandonware games sorted by popularity

Fast Food Dizzy, released in 1989 for DOS, is exactly as chaotic as the title suggests. Starring the famously round egg hero, the game drops Dizzy into a world where food falls fro...

Is it Breakout? Is it Arkanoid? No — it’s Bananoid, the fruitiest bat-and-ball clone you never asked for. With bananas, monkeys, and psychedelic colors, it feels like s...

The Last Express, released in 1997, is a unique adventure game designed by Jordan Mechner, the creator of Prince of Persia. Set on the Orient Express in July 1914, just before Worl...

Based on the French comic series, The Quest for the Time-bird (1989, DOS) offers a fantasy adventure full of personality, odd creatures, and enough lore to fill a small library. Th...

Space Ace 2: Borf’s Revenge (1991, DOS) doubles down on everything that made the first one iconic — and maddening. Borf is back, still blue, still obnoxious, and once a...

Fox Ranger is a side-scrolling shooter that wastes no time explaining itself—because lasers are self-explanatory. You pilot a sleek craft through swarms of enemies with the s...

Conflict is a turn-based war game where you get to play Commander-in-Chief and yell at your virtual generals when things go wrong (which they often do). It's part military sim, par...

Shadows Over Riva caps the trilogy with a confident stride. The graphics receive a welcome upgrade, the atmosphere takes a darker turn, and the narrative leans heavily into detecti...

Grand Prix is one of those games that tries to bottle the thrill of Formula racing and pour it into a DOS machine that wheezes like an overworked engine. In Grand Prix, you get a s...

If Shakespeare wrote video games and then decided, “You know what this needs? A parser and some pixelated drama,” you'd get Avon. In this interactive fiction gem from 1...

Ulises is a mythological adventure that wears its classical inspiration proudly, even when the technology struggles to keep up. Drawing loosely from Homer’s Odyssey, the game...

In Reunion, you return to a solar system that’s moved on without you—like showing up to your own birthday party two centuries late. Your mission? Rebuild civilization, ...

Scavengers of the Mutant World (1988) takes you to a post-apocalyptic wasteland where radiation has turned most life forms into something between a potato and a death machine. Your...

The last entry in Infocom’s Enchanter trilogy, Spellbreaker is where the training wheels come off. It’s unforgiving, cryptic, and expects you to understand spellcraft l...

X-Men 2: The Fall of the Mutants is a curious blend of action and light strategy, where Marvel’s famous mutants get to stretch their powers across a series of loosely connected m...

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...

Darkstone tried to ride the Diablo wave in 1999, and honestly, it didn’t do a bad job. With 3D graphics (impressive for the time) and a soundtrack that takes itself way too s...

The Third Courier is an abandoned (atypical) adventure / role playing game set in Berlin during the cold war era and, of course, it's a spy game. The Third Courier was developed by...

Before Indiana Jones had a whip, Chagunitzu had block puzzles. Released in 1990 by Softdisk (and developed by a young John Romero), this game is a precursor to God of Thunder and p...

Floor 13 hands you the keys to a shadowy government office and suggests you protect national stability by any means necessary. It’s part strategy, part moral dilemma, and ent...