abandonware games sorted by popularity

Silicon Dreams by Level 9 Computing is a trilogy of interactive fiction (text adventure) games released in the mid-1980s. The trilogy includes three separate games: Snowball, Retur...

Rings of Medusa is a strategy / RPG developed by the German studio Starbyte Software. It was released in 1989 for various platforms including the Commodore 64, Amiga, and MS-DOS.&n...

African Adventure is one of those games that feels like it was made during a two-hour layover at the airport - but somehow, it works. Set in the savannah, it combines survival, exp...

In 1998, Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War decided the world needed fewer corridors and more cosmic dogfights. Instead of bumping into walls like a drunken astronaut, you&rs...

Little-known but oddly captivating, Kurtan (1990, DOS) feels like someone’s ambitious homebrew fantasy experiment gone right. You play a wandering warrior exploring a pixelat...

Back in 1985, Cavequest asked: what if you mixed ASCII graphics with deadly bats and claustrophobia? The answer: a punishingly hard maze crawler that’ll have you screaming at...

Before AI could annihilate grandmasters, Psion Chess was already humbling humans back in 1985. Available for DOS and Macintosh, this game wasn’t flashy, but it didn’t n...

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...

NCSA Mosaic was one of the earliest web browsers to appear on the market. It was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illino...

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier takes the least-loved movie in the franchise and turns it into a game — which is bold, maybe even illogical. Released in 1989 for DOS, it trie...

Conan: The Cimmerian lets you brawl your way through the Hyborian Age like a shirtless rage machine with a sword and questionable dialogue. It’s got all the ingredients: dark...

Step into the gray, morally ambiguous world of corporate domination with Big Business. It’s Monopoly with fewer dice and more spreadsheets. Crush your competitors, manipulate...

L'Empereur (1991) is one of those games that looks at Napoleon and says, “Yes, but what if we made it complicated?” This DOS strategy title drops you straight into the ...

Time to hit the lanes in 10th Frame, a bowling simulator so committed to realism it even simulates the wait between turns. You line up your shot, set your spin, and pray the ancien...