abandonware games sorted by popularity

There’s something oddly admirable about a game that hands you a polyester-clad disaster like Larry and says, “Go on, make him succeed.” Leisure Suit Larry 1: In t...

If arcades had a heartbeat in the mid-90s, Daytona USA (1994) was it. This racing game was Sega’s love letter to neon lights, loud engines, and steering wheels that rattled l...

4Play was a risqué trivia and multi-player board-style game released in the mid-1990s. Designed as a party game, it combined trivia questions, mini-games, and challenge...

Double Dragon II: The Revenge (1988) takes everything that made the first game fun and cranks it up a notch. The story begins with tragedy—Marian, the damsel from the first g...

You’ve never really lived until you’ve watched a rook pick up a pawn and slam dunk it into the floor. Battle Chess (1988) turns the world’s most intellectual boar...

dBASE III is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that was popular in the late 1980s. It was developed by Ashton-Tate, a software company. dBASE III was a successor to t...

Elvira 2: The Jaws of Cerberus doubles down on everything that made the first game memorable: horror, humor, and puzzles that seem designed to mock you. Elvira herself steals the s...

If you ever wanted to roleplay in a text adventure where a coconut is of utmost importance, Beyond Zork has your back. This is Infocom at its most delightfully weird: part RPG, par...

If Lorna were a comic book, it would be the kind your parents warned you about. Based on the Spanish sci-fi heroine by Alfonso Azpiri, this 1990 action-platformer on DOS is a cockt...

Tetris 2.0 attempts to spice up the classic formula with a few twists, like a chef adding unexpected ingredients to a beloved recipe. Sometimes it works, sometimes you miss the ori...

Mick's Strip Poker combines card-game mechanics with an adult presentation, offering a digital version of strip poker that reflects the technology and attitudes of its era. The bas...

Runaway City is a 1995 DOS game that combines exploration, action, and urban adventure in a setting where simply getting from one place to another can become an unexpectedly compli...

Starflight is a 1986 science-fiction role-playing and exploration game that gives players an entire galaxy to investigate. You command a starship, travel between planets, land on a...

Season of the Sakura (1997) is what happens when a high school dating sim meets anime melodrama. You play a student navigating the treacherous waters of friendship, love, and quest...

The Hobbit is an early computer adaptation of Tolkien's famous novel, transforming Bilbo Baggins' journey from comfortable hobbit hole to dangerous adventure into an interactive te...

Spacewar is one of the earliest digital computer games and is often considered the first interactive video game. It was created in 1962 by Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne W...

The spiritual sequel to SimTower, Yoot Tower asks the important question: what if you were god, but only over elevators, sushi bars, and the occasional alien invasion? It’s a...

The Settlers (also known as Serf City: Life is Feudal) is the kind of game that turns you into a benevolent yet slightly obsessive medieval manager. You don’t just build...

Mix one part turn-based strategy, one part fantasy novel, add a dash of dragon, and you get Age of Wonders (1999). This is the game where wizards rule, elves sulk in forests, and y...

Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight is an action-RPG and strategy game developed by Rob Anderson and published by Mindscape in 1991 for the Amiga and later for MS-DOS. The game is famous...

The Amazing Spider-Man is a side-scrolling action game developed by Oxford Digital Enterprises and published by Paragon Software for MS-DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST. The plot revolves ...

With FIFA Soccer 97, EA decided indoor soccer was exactly what the world had been waiting for, and honestly, they weren’t entirely wrong. The pace is frantic, the rebounds ar...

HeroQuest brings the tabletop experience to the screen with a sincerity that is hard not to appreciate. It tries to recreate the feeling of gathering around a board, complete with ...

Knights of Xentar (1994, DOS) is what happens when anime meets adult humor and forgets to use its filter. This cheeky RPG follows a perverted hero on a quest filled with ridiculous...

Yu-Gi-Oh! Online takes the collectible card game into a persistent digital environment where players can build decks, duel opponents, and spend a suspicious amount of time discussi...

Hero's Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero is a charming blend of role-playing and adventure that gently nudges you into a world where saving the day involves as much thinking as it do...

Star Wars: X-Wing is a 1993 space combat simulator that finally allowed PC players to experience the Star Wars universe from the cockpit of its famous starfighters. Players begin a...

Baldur's Gate a fantasy RPG set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe which is regarded as the RPG that brought new life in a dying genre in the late 90s. Baldur's Gate was d...

Bigger, bolder, and with more statues of yourself than ever, Caesar 2 builds on its predecessor like Rome after a good tax season. Now you get to manage both cities and provinces, ...

Premier Manager was released in 1992 by Gremlin Interactive for the Commodore Amiga and MS-DOS platforms. It was one of the earliest football management simulation games and allowe...