Side-scrolling games sorted by release date

Forget Sonic. Forget Mario. Zool is a ninja from the Nth Dimension, which is apparently a place where hyperactive insects fight sentient sweets. Speed is the name of the game, and Zool never walks—he zips, spins, and somersa...

Yes, it’s that Beethoven—the slobbery St. Bernard, not the piano guy. In Beethoven 2, you control a surprisingly agile dog on a quest to rescue your kidnapped puppies. Along the way, you’ll bark at birds, jump on...

Mutants! Explosions! Green slime! Bio Menace kicks off with Dr. Mangle’s Lab, a side-scrolling blast of carnage where you, Snake Logan (yes, really), shoot your way through a monster-infested city with a machine gun and a ba...

Snake Logan is back, and this time the lab is... hidden! The Hidden Lab cranks up the challenge with more grotesque mutants, more lethal traps, and slightly improved sarcasm. It’s like episode one, but with less common sense...

The trilogy concludes in Master Cain, where Snake Logan faces the ultimate evil: a villain with a name that sounds like a Bond bad guy and a plan straight from Saturday morning cartoons. Expect one last hurrah of mutant-blasting m...

Body Blows is a 2D fighting game developed and published by Team17, released in 1993. It was initially launched for the Amiga and later ported to MS-DOS. Body Blows was one of the few fighting games to emerge from Europe during th...

Take American football, remove the rules, add swords and fireballs, and throw in some screaming. That is Brutal Sports Football. This is not about touchdowns. This is about survival. Players can be decapitated, the ball can explod...

Cosmic Spacehead is a cheerful point-and-click adventure wrapped in platformer segments, starring a purple alien who’s equal parts explorer and goofball. You’ll travel colorful worlds, solve quirky puzzles, and occasio...

Dangerous Dave: Risky Rescue puts Dave back in hero mode, diving into a dangerous compound to rescue his brother. Expect tight platforming, unpredictable enemy patterns, and traps that seem pulled straight from an evil game design...

By 1993, Dragon Force - Day 3 landed as an obscure tactical experiment on DOS. Despite the name, it’s not about a power metal band’s rehearsal schedule but rather a day-by-day fantasy strategy campaign. The gameplay is...

By the time Duke Nukem II rolled around, Duke had found his groove—and his ego. The gameplay is tighter, the explosions bigger, and the quips slightly more self-aware. It’s classic run-and-gun action with sci-fi flair ...

Don’t let the clown fool you—Krusty’s Super Funhouse (1993, DOS) is more puzzle torture chamber than funhouse. You guide Krusty as he exterminates waves of rats using an army of Simpsons characters and some carto...

Pac-in-Time is an abandoned action side-scrolling platformer game developed by Kalisto Entertainment and released by Mindscape in 1993 for DOS. Pac-in-time was but also published for other platforms such as Amiga, Game Boy, Mac, S...

Prehistorik 2 builds on the first game’s formula but smooths out the rough edges. The controls are tighter, the levels more inventive, and the humor dialed up a notch. Once again, you’re a caveman armed with an infinit...

The Blues Brothers 2: Jukebox Adventure is a video game developed by Titus Interactive and released in 1993. It is a sequel to the original The Blues Brothers game, which was based on the popular 1980 film of the same name. The ga...

The Lost Vikings is an old DOS platform-puzzle game, developed by Silicon & Synapse and published by Interplay Productions in 1993. In The Lost Vikings you have to solve puzzles by controlling three characters (glorious v...