abandonware games sorted by popularity

Before Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, the world only knew of one man who could mow down Nazis in a maze of corridors — then Blake showed up with a laser gun and a mission to ri...

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...

Ishar 2 (1994, DOS) picks up where the first game left off, and then throws in more ways to punish careless adventurers. It’s a first-person RPG where managing your party isn...

Beyond Columns is what happens when someone looks at Tetris and says, “What if we made it... slightly fancier?” This match-three puzzle game involves dropping shiny col...

Before Diablo made clicking on dungeons cool, DarkSpyre was already throwing players into labyrinths filled with monsters and puzzles. Released in 1990, it combines hack-and-slash ...

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...

Released in 1994, Lords of the Realm is medieval strategy with a distinctly hands-on attitude. This isn’t just about moving armies; it’s about managing land, people, an...

Dune Generations was a canceled 3D MMO strategy game set in the Dune universe that was never published. Dune Generations was in development by Cryo Interactive ...

Italian noir meets circus mystery in Yellow Kid: Giallo al Circo, where you play a journalist with a yellow trench coat and more curiosity than self-preservation. The game’s ...

Borland Reflex was a relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by Borland International, a software company that was prominent in the 1980s and 1990s. Reflex was rele...

Released in 1982, Deadline is one of Infocom’s classic text adventures, and it doesn’t pull punches. You’re a detective with twelve in-game hours to solve a murde...

In Core War Plus, programming isn’t just for making spreadsheets—it’s for virtual combat. You write tiny programs that battle for control of computer memory, turn...

Operation Getafix (1989) is what happens when you turn a beloved comic series into a game with the precision of a wild boar wearing gloves. You play as Asterix on a quest to help G...

Flight of the Amazon Queen is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Interactive Binary Illusions and originally released in 1995. The game is heavily inspired by the likes ...

Eternam is a gloriously strange hybrid of 3D exploration, adventure puzzles, and comedic sci-fi. You play Don Jonzon, a man just trying to enjoy a vacation—only to end up cha...

In Castle Master, you get dropped into a spooky polygonal castle and told, “Figure it out.” And that’s it. Early 3D graphics make every wall look like it was pain...

Xtrek is a multiplayer-focused space simulation that captures the spirit of cooperative and competitive gameplay long before it became mainstream. Players pilot ships, complete obj...