abandonware games sorted by popularity

Norton Commander was a file manager and editor application released by Peter Norton Computing for DOS. Norton Commander used a text-based user interface with side-by-side pane...

Star Crusader is an abandoned science fiction first-person 3D space combat simulator, developed by Take-Two Interactive and published by GameTek in 1994 for both DOS and Amiga plat...

Subtlety is not in Fire and Forget’s vocabulary. You drive. You shoot. Things explode. That’s the pitch, and the game sticks to it with admirable stubbornness. Released...

Dylan Dog: Through the Looking Glass takes the surrealism of the comics and dives headfirst into nightmare territory. Imagine Carroll’s Wonderland rewritten by Lovecraft and ...

Colorado (1990, DOS) drops you into the buckskin boots of a rugged frontiersman navigating the Wild West with guns, canoes, and questionable hygiene. Equal parts action and explora...

European Championship 1992 captures football in a raw, almost scrappy form. This isn’t about realism or presentation; it’s about getting the ball forward and hoping for...

Xixit is a puzzle game that feels like it is constantly trying to outwit you, presenting challenges that require both logic and a bit of creative thinking. It does not rely on flas...

When Strider (1989, DOS) hit PCs, gamers suddenly felt like ninjas who’d been dropped into a Cold War fever dream. You play as Hiryu, a futuristic assassin slicing through me...

Uplink: Hacker Elite drops you into a digital underworld where your keyboard is your most powerful weapon. Released in 2001, it blends strategy and simulation, tasking you with bre...

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...

Before Football Manager consumed the souls of soccer nerds everywhere, there was Club Football: The Manager. It’s all spreadsheets, transfers, and managing egos with egos. Th...

In Arcade Volleyball (1987), two pixelated figures smack a ball over a net with all the grace of caffeinated stick figures. It's simple, it's bizarre, and it somehow manages to be ...

IndyCar Racing is a racing simulation video game developed by Papyrus Design Group and published by Virgin Interactive. Released in 1993 for MS-DOS, it marked a significant step fo...

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, ...

Exile II: Crystal Souls is the kind of RPG that quietly sneaks into your life and then refuses to leave your thoughts. Released in 1996, it looks humble, even a bit scruffy, but be...

Flying Tigers (1994, DOS) throws you into the Pacific theater with a grin and a trigger finger that never quite rests. It’s loud, brash, and unashamedly action-oriented, the ...

X-COM: Apocalypse takes the familiar alien invasion formula and tosses it into a sprawling futuristic city, where things feel both more chaotic and oddly more personal. Instead of ...

Silverball is an abandoned DOS pinball action game developed by Digital Extremes, designed by James Schmalz and published by MicroLeague Multimedia in 1993. Silverball is one of th...

In Knight Games (1988, DOS), the Middle Ages meet joystick warfare. Think of it as a digital renaissance fair with fewer turkey legs and more sword clashing. You can joust, fence, ...

Acquire (1989, DOS) brings boardroom drama to your DOS screen, turning you into a hotel tycoon in a game where the real enemy is... math. It's a faithful adaptation of the classic ...

Ground Control throws you into real-time strategy without the safety net of base building, which is both refreshing and slightly terrifying. In Ground Control, every unit matters, ...

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, deployi...