abandonware games sorted by popularity

DuckTales: The Quest for Gold takes everyone’s favorite miserly duck, Scrooge McDuck, and sends him globetrotting for treasure. It’s part platformer, part management si...

Risky Woods is a 1992 platform adventure that combines colorful fantasy environments with fast-paced action and challenging level design. Players guide a young hero through forests...

Released in 1987, Laser Surgeon: The Microscopic Mission offers one of gaming's more unusual premises by shrinking players down for a medical adventure inside the human body. Inste...

Released in 1984, Zyll is what happens when a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master learns to code and decides to build a text adventure inside a coffee machine. There are no graph...

Outbound is a 2001 adventure game set in a world of science fiction, exploration, and strange environments that are considerably less welcoming than the average tourist destination...

Ah yes, the golden age of video games: where catching babies yeeted from burning buildings was a fun pastime. In Bouncing Babies, you play as a heroic volunteer with a trampoline, ...

Journey: The Quest Begins is an ambitious role-playing adventure from 1989 that mixes exploration, character development, and fantasy storytelling. Players travel through a world f...

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 roguel...

High Command: Europe 1939-45 is a strategy game that does not shy away from complexity, asking players to engage with history on a grand scale. The mechanics are detailed, sometime...

Thexder is a wonderfully odd hybrid of shooting and exploration, built around a small transforming robot that can switch between walking and flying forms. That transformation is no...

The Great War: 1914 - 1918 is a historical strategy game focused on the First World War, a conflict where “just move forward” was famously not an especially successful tactical...

A gloriously grimy cyberpunk romp, Ranx: The Video Game drops you in a future where technology, attitude, and questionable hygiene coexist in uneasy harmony. Based on the French co...

Back in 1986, when most PC users were still figuring out floppy disks, along came Dr. Ruth Computer Game of Good Sex, a title that promised to educate while entertaining. Imagine t...

If Barbie was mildly passive in her 1992 debut, Barbie Super Model (1993) puts her on the runway—literally. You’ll practice walking, dodging obstacles, and matching out...

Hugo 2: Whodunit? continues the series with a mystery that is equal parts charming and perplexing. Released in 1991, it builds on its predecessor with improved visuals and a slight...

Quattro Pro v4 is a mature DOS spreadsheet application from Borland, designed for serious number crunching and business work at a time when spreadsheets were becoming indispensable...

Ah, Championship Manager 93, the game that taught us yelling at pixels is a valid emotional outlet. It's you, a keyboard, and a list of players with stamina ratings. No fancy graph...

Nobunaga's Ambition 2 expands on the historical strategy formula of its predecessor, once again placing players in the turbulent world of feudal Japan. Released in 1989, the game c...

Cossacks: European Wars is a real-time strategy epic that lets you command armies so big you’ll lose track of half your soldiers. Set in the 17th and 18th centuries, it&rsquo...

It’s cyber. It’s puck. It’s… basically cyberpunk air hockey with attitude. 3D Cyberpuck is a futuristic sport simulation from 1992 that nobody asked for, y...

Color Buster (1992, DOS) is Sokoban’s rebellious cousin. You push colored blocks across labyrinthine floors like an underpaid warehouse worker in a pastel fever dream. Simple...

Borland Eureka: the Solver is an abandoned text-based application developed by Borland Software Corporation and released in 1987 for DOS. The product is designed to solve complex p...

Dominus (1994) is what happens when a tower defense game and an RPG get thrown into a medieval blender. You’re tasked with defending your castle from wave after wave of enemi...

Night Hunter is a 1988 action game that embraces the idea of being a creature of the night and then gives the player plenty of reasons to regret leaving the house after sunset. The...

The Operative: No One Lives Forever is a stylish first-person shooter that mixes espionage, comedy, and action with the confidence of a secret agent who has absolutely no intention...

Warriors of Legend is an action-oriented fantasy adventure that throws the player into a world of combat, exploration, and heroic trouble. Released in 1993, it offers the familiar ...

If System Shock was a warning, System Shock 2 is the full-blown nightmare that follows. This time, the horror seeps into every corner of the experience, blending RPG mechanics with...

Imagine a game where minesweeper meets viral chaos—Chain Reaction (1996) isn’t quite that, but it is a fast-paced puzzle-action hybrid where things blow up in neat litt...

Dragon Slayer: the Legend of Heroes is a classic Japanese-style role-playing adventure that combines exploration, character development, combat, and a traditional fantasy story. Yo...

Put on your mental trench coat, because Codebreaker is here to make you feel smart—or incredibly foolish. It’s a brain-teasing logic game where you deduce secret number...