abandonware games sorted by popularity

Tomahawk is an early helicopter flight simulation that puts the player behind the controls of a military aircraft and expects them to take the job rather seriously. Navigation, wea...

Lancelot (1988) is an action-adventure that draws loosely from Arthurian legend and very tightly from the difficulty school of “good luck.” You guide the famous knight ...

Chessmaster 8000 is a comprehensive chess package aimed at everyone from casual players to serious enthusiasts. At its heart is a full chess engine capable of providing opponents a...

Dogs of War (1996) drops you into a gritty mercenary’s life where missions mean money, and money means better gear. Set on Windows XP, the game blends strategy and action wit...

With Gary Grigsby’s War in Russia, the scale somehow gets even bigger, and the margin for error even smaller. This is strategy at its most unforgiving, where moving a unit on...

If you’ve ever looked at Tetris and thought, “This needs to be in 3D and way harder,” then BlockOut 2 (2000) is your kind of punishment. This brain-melter takes f...

Paperboy 2 expands the original concept by introducing new routes, additional hazards, and even more opportunities for suburban chaos. Delivering newspapers remains the central obj...

S.T.U.N. Runner is a 1990 DOS conversion of Atari's futuristic arcade racer, throwing players into a high-speed world of twisting tracks, jumps, enemies, and spectacular obstacles....

ShadowCaster is a 1993 DOS first-person action RPG that blends fantasy, exploration, and combat in a world where the player can transform into different magical creatures. Each for...

Hard Drivin' is what happens when someone looks at arcade racing and decides that what it really needs is existential dread and a physics engine that actively judges your driving s...

Imagine Doom and Ultima Underworld had a low-budget child who was homeschooled in a basement filled with Mountain Dew cans. That’s Amulets & Armor. A mix of first-person ...

Gloriana sails into the realm of naval strategy with a focus on historical battles and tactical maneuvering. Ships move with a deliberate pace, and positioning is everything, turni...

Kroz returns, and with it, your CRT monitor’s worst nightmare: ASCII graphics! Return to Kroz takes you back to a time when @ meant “you,” and everything else was...

By 1999, Liero had become a cult favorite thanks to its frantic real-time battles between heavily armed worms. Unlike turn-based competitors, the action never pauses, creating chao...

Santa's Xmas Caper is a 1993 DOS holiday-themed action game that puts players in the middle of a festive adventure involving Santa Claus and the usual seasonal chaos. Instead of qu...

Loopz, released in 1990, is the kind of puzzle game that looks innocent for about five seconds before it starts humbling you. The concept is simple: connect the pieces, form loops,...

In Allan Border’s Cricket (1993), you get to live the thrill of... waiting. A lot. But when the action kicks in, it’s surprisingly engaging. Named after the Australian ...

Now with more charts than ever! Baseball Mogul 2006 lets you relive the thrilling world of late-season trades and player salary negotiations in glorious Windows XP-era style. It&rs...

Meteor Mission is a classic space shooter built around a simple but timeless objective: defend yourself against relentless waves of incoming threats and keep firing until the unive...

World Tour Golf is an early golf simulation built around the eternal challenge of sending a small white ball toward a hole while avoiding the temptation to blame the weather, the c...

You don’t need to hate spiders to fear Arachnophobia (1991), but it helps. Based on the movie of the same name, it tasks you with exterminating wave after wave of creepy craw...

Cossacks: Back to War expands the large-scale real-time strategy formula of the Cossacks series with additional factions, campaigns, and battles inspired by European warfare. Huge ...

Chris Sawyer's Locomotion is a transport-management simulation built around the wonderfully addictive business of moving people and cargo from one place to another. Trains are the ...

Oxyd is a 1992 puzzle game built around a deceptively simple concept: move objects, solve problems, and somehow avoid making the situation much more complicated than it needs to be...

Rendezvous with Rama is a 1985 DOS adventure based on Arthur C. Clarke's celebrated science-fiction novel. Players explore the mysterious Rama, a gigantic alien spacecraft that has...

Forget missiles—Blue Max: Aces of the Great War takes you back to when air combat meant leather helmets, canvas wings, and a healthy fear of gravity. Released in 1990 for DOS...

In Commander Keen 5: The Armageddon Machine, Keen infiltrates a massive space station engineered to obliterate planets like it’s swatting flies. This is Keen at his most tech...

Onslaught (1990, DOS) takes the classic top-down shoot-and-survive formula and injects it with an enthusiasm that borders on reckless. Hordes of enemies sprint at you like they&rsq...

Released in 1990, Kick Off 2 is one of those football games that politely refuses to hold your hand. The ball does not magically stick to your player, meaning every sprint becomes ...

Turbo Prolog 2.0 is a programming environment built around Prolog, a language particularly associated with artificial intelligence, symbolic reasoning, and rule-based problem solvi...