abandonware games sorted by popularity

SimCity (or SimCity Classic) is a popular city building simulation in which you, the mayor of a city, have to build a metropolis from the ground up. You can build police and fire departments, assign industrial, residential or comm...

In Carmageddon, winning a race is just one of three options—the other two involve mowing down pedestrians or wrecking your opponents. It’s the game your parents definitely didn’t want you playing, and that’...

Tyrian 2000 is an old DOS science fiction classic shoot'em up, developed by Eclipse Software and designed by Alexander Brandon, Jason Emery, Daniel Cook. Tyrian 2000 is one of the most popular shoot'em ups ever published for ...

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 the earlier dBASE II and was part of a series of dB...

FIFA Soccer 97 is a football video game developed and published by EA Sports as part of the FIFA series. Released in 1996 for various platforms, it was the fourth installment in the FIFA series and introduced several new features....

Zork is one of the most popular text-adventures and one of the first interactive fiction games ever created. The first Zork was developed in the seventies and ported on various platform by Infocom in the early 80s. Infocom wa...

Ah, Lula: The Sexy Empire (1997, Windows) — the game that tried to make adult business management classy and failed spectacularly. You play Lula, a buxom entrepreneur trying to build an erotic entertainment empire. Between c...

Wing Commander: Armada is space combat simulation game developed by Origin Systems and released by Electronic Arts in 1994 for DOS. Wing Commander: Armada is part of the Wing Commander game series and was published before Wind Com...

Dune II, released in 1992, is a pioneering real-time strategy game developed by Westwood Studios. Set in the world of Frank Herbert's Dune, players command noble houses in a battle for control over the planet Arrakis. With base-bu...

Black & White (2001) is what happens when a god game gets a bit too literal. You play as a deity, complete with a giant hand, an enormous ego, and a giant pet that poops on villagers. Will you be kind and benevolent, or a flam...

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I is an abandoned fantasy top-down DOS RPG game set in the The Lord of the Rings universe. The Lord of the Rings I was developed and released by Interplay Productions in 1990. The ...

If Grand Theft Auto had a German uncle who worked in finance, it might look a lot like Dime City. Released in 1995 for DOS, this oddball title blends business simulation with underworld dealings. You manage a criminal empire, jugg...

Before Worms, before Scorched Earth, there was Tank Wars. Two or more tanks perched on random hills, firing explosive math problems at each other. Adjust your angle, set your power, and pray to the god of pixel physics. The graphi...

Donkey Kong is a landmark video game franchise created by Shigeru Miyamoto and first released by Nintendo in 1981. The original arcade game introduced players to a narrative where a carpenter named Jumpman, who would later become ...

Before Battle Chess, there was Archon. Imagine a board game where pawns and knights settle disputes not with rules, but with full-on gladiatorial combat. Archon gives you light versus dark, spellcasters versus golems, and battles ...

Blades of Steel is hockey the way it was meant to be. Fast, brutal, and occasionally resembling a bar fight on ice. The game lets you punch other players mid-match and the announcer’s voice sounds like a robot trying to shou...

Quake II is a first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and released in 1997. It is the sequel to the original Quake and was a significant milestone in the evolution of 3D graphics in video games. Quake II main...

The Incredible Machine (part of The Incredible Machine series) is a single-player peculiar DOS physics-puzzle game developed by Jeff Tunnell Productions and published by Sierra On-Line in 1993. The goal of the game is to buil...

Deluxe Paint, often abbreviated as DPaint, was a popular bitmap graphics editor and animation software package. It was developed by Electronic Arts (EA) and released in the mid-1980s. Deluxe Paint was initially designed for the Co...

Transport Tycoon Deluxe is a business simulation game where players take control of a transport company, competing against rivals. Players can build stations, airports, and railroads to transport passengers, mail, and various good...

When H.R. Giger is involved, you know things will get weird. Dark Seed (1992) is a point-and-click horror adventure where you play Mike Dawson, a man haunted by nightmarish visions after an alien embryo is implanted in his skull. ...