abandonware games sorted by popularity

England Championship Special (1991, DOS) is the kind of football game that doesn’t pretend to know what the Premier League will look like in 30 years—it just wants you to enjoy kicking a pixelated ball around without o...

In ACE 2 (1987, DOS), you and a buddy can engage in split-screen dogfights so slow they make real air combat look like fast-forwarded ballet. The graphics are simple, but the charm is in the rivalry — few things bond friends...

Ah, 9 Poker. Released in 1989 for DOS, this game is less a glamorous casino sim and more a smoky backroom full of pixelated cards and questionable programming. You get nine variants of poker to lose fake money in, which is both ge...

Welcome to 2112, a game that predicted a grim techno-future back when floppy disks still ruled. This DOS-era oddity throws you into a world that’s part cyberpunk, part fever dream, and entirely confusing. It’s got clun...

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, turning coding into a gladiator sport. It’s part...

Color Buster (1992, DOS) is Sokoban’s rebellious cousin. You push colored blocks across labyrinthine floors like an underpaid warehouse worker in a pastel fever dream. Simple premise? Sure. But give it five levels and your b...

In Archimedean Dynasty, humanity did the logical thing after wrecking the surface world: moved underwater and started shooting each other in submarines. It's part tactical sim, part gritty sci-fi novella, and entirely German in it...

Released in 1983, Sea Dragon turns underwater navigation into an exercise in patience and joystick control. You pilot a submarine through caves filled with mines, enemies, and claustrophobic tunnels that make you question your ref...

The Fourth Protocol is a 1985 interactive fiction video game inspired by Frederick Forsyth's 1984 Cold War spy novel of the same name. Developed by the Electronic Pencil Company and published by Hutchinson Computer Publishing, the...

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, Return to Eden, and The Worm in Paradise. Each game com...

In Taipan for Windows, you’re not a hero, you’re a 19th-century capitalist trying to get rich trading tea, silk, and the occasional bit of opium in the South China Sea. Think Oregon Trail, but with more pirates and mor...

Oil's Well is an action-puzzle game released by Sierra On-Line in 1983/84. It was originally made for platforms like the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and MS-DOS, but was later ported to other systems. The game is set in an...

Douglas Adams, the twisted genius behind Hitchhiker’s Guide, brings you the most terrifying adventure of all: paperwork. Bureaucracy turns mundane modern life into a text-based hellscape of lost forms, passive-aggressive cle...

Acquire (1989, DOS) brings boardroom drama to your DOS screen, turning you into a hotel tycoon in a game where the real enemy is... math. It's a faithful adaptation of the classic board game, complete with mergers, hostile takeove...

Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge is a role-playing game (RPG) developed by Sir-Tech and released in 1990. It's the sixth installment in the long-running "Wizardry" series. The game begins with the player's party investig...