abandonware games sorted by popularity

Cirque de Zale is a point-and-click adventure game released in 2004, developed by Rebecca Clements as a freeware title. Created using the Adventure Game Studio (AGS) engine, the ga...

If gravity had a sense of humor, it would look like Bounce Zone. This 1990 DOS oddball is part platformer, part physics experiment, and part unintentional comedy. You bounce. A lot...

Escape from Delirium feels like someone took a pulp adventure novel, dipped it in a bucket of chaos, and fed it to a DOS system. You wake up with amnesia (because of course you do)...

Dark, moody, and surprisingly creepy, Zork Nemesis is what happens when the whimsical world of Zork goes goth. The text adventures are gone—now it’s full-motion video, ...

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...

Black Hole (1993) is a space shooter where you're thrown into the gravitational madness of, you guessed it, a black hole. The physics are wild, the enemies are relentless, and you&...

A moody sci-fi adventure drenched in neon gloom, The Orion Conspiracy (1995, DOS) tosses you into a futuristic murder mystery where everyone seems to be hiding something—ofte...

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 ...

More illustrations, more intrigue, more doom. The Crystal of Doom continues the hybrid of comic-style storytelling and light role-playing with just enough choices to make you feel ...

Dungeon Explorer takes the term “dungeon” very seriously—there’s a lot of it, and not much else. Released in 1990, this top-down adventure is part RPG, part...

Before realistic fighting games, there was Boxer Rebellion—a 1982 title so primitive, it makes Pong look flashy. It’s boxing with fewer rules and more pixels per punch....

Zork: Grand Inquisitor is the ultimate swan song for the series—and what a finale it is. Combining laugh-out-loud humor, point-and-click puzzles, and a talking lantern voiced...

Shadowcaster is a first-person action role-playing game developed by Raven Software and published by Origin Systems. It was released in 1993 for MS-DOS computers.In Shadowcaster, p...

MicroProse Soccer is an abandoned action-oriented soccer game, developed by Sensible Software and released by MicroProse Software in 1988. The appeal of MicroProse Soccer was its s...

Civil War buffs, rejoice. Battle of Antietam (1985) lets you relive one of the bloodiest days in American history... via pixelated dots and turn-based tension. There’s no fla...

In Arcade Volleyball (1987), two pixelated figures smack a ball over a net with all the grace of caffeinated stick figures. It's simple, it's bizarre, and it somehow manages to be ...

In Blitzkrieg: Battle at the Ardennes, you’re not just playing a wargame — you’re being handed a clipboard, a stack of orders, and a freezing cold battlefield in ...