abandonware games sorted by popularity

Released in 1989, this game has you exploring a tomb filled with ancient evils. Navigate through dark corridors, solve puzzles, and confront the awakening demons. It's like playing...

Shadows Over Riva caps the trilogy with a confident stride. The graphics receive a welcome upgrade, the atmosphere takes a darker turn, and the narrative leans heavily into detecti...

If text adventures are your thing, Star Trek: The Kobayashi Alternative (1985, DOS) will either delight or destroy you. You type commands to guide Kirk and crew through a no-win sc...

It’s 1990, and you’re sitting at your DOS PC playing Accordion, a game that somehow turns solitaire into something slower and more passive-aggressive. It’s not fl...

Welcome to the squared circle of wireframe pain. Released in 1991 for DOS, this game puts you in the gloves of a boxer rendered entirely out of jagged geometry. The animation was r...

Sports games in 1990 weren’t exactly realistic, but Double Dribble made a surprisingly good attempt. This Konami basketball title brought fast-paced, side-scrolling action to...

In Tau Ceti, you’re the lone pilot of a heavily armed hoverbike trying to reboot a dying colony under an alien sun. It’s slow, moody, and brilliantly atmospheric. The v...

Infestation drops you onto a hostile alien world where the welcome committee consists mostly of things with too many legs and way too many teeth. The game mixes exploration and act...

Antarctic Adventure (1986) stars a penguin who seems to be training for the Winter Olympics — at full sprint. This early Konami game has you racing across icy terrain, dodgin...

Released back when computers still hummed ominously and monitors glowed like radioactive jellyfish, Epidemic! throws you into the grim business of stopping a deadly outbreak. The i...

Back in 1989, David Wolf: Secret Agent tried really hard to make you feel like James Bond. You get car chases, fistfights, and enough cheesy dialogue to fill an action movie marath...

In Armor Alley, you command a helicopter in a warzone that looks like a side-scrolling office meeting gone wrong. It’s strategy meets action: you must manage resources, deplo...

One-Nil Soccer Manager is a text-based soccer management simulation game that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was developed for various home computer systems, inc...

Martian Memorandum is a point-and-click adventure game developed and published by Access Software. It was released in 1991 and is the sequel to the game Mean Streets. The game is s...

This sequel takes the same D&D-in-space formula and tries to go bigger, bolder, and... okay, maybe just more complicated. Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed continues the galactic strug...

TomeNET (Troubles of Middle Earth, Net) is an online, multiplayer rogue-like game set in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth. It’s a persistent-world game inspired by ...