abandonware games sorted by popularity

In Contraption Zack, you play as a kid with more mechanical gadgets than common sense. Your job? Fix a series of increasingly absurd machines in a puzzle platformer that’s eq...

Do you enjoy betrayal, backstabbing, and pretending to be a global power while actually being terrible at geography? Computer Diplomacy is the digital version of the classic board ...

Video Casino is a straightforward casino simulation that brings several familiar gambling games to the computer screen. The idea is wonderfully simple: choose your game, place your...

Released in 1990, Joe Montana Football attempts to capture the excitement of American football while making the sport accessible to computer players. Featuring the legendary quarte...

CyClones is a first-person shooter where you take on the role of a bio-engineered super-soldier fighting alien invaders. The controls are smooth, the weapons varied, and the level ...

Jane's Combat Simulations: Advanced Tactical Fighters arrived in 1996 and delivered the kind of detailed flight simulation that aviation enthusiasts love. Players take control of m...

Galactix continues the grand space-shooter tradition with enthusiasm and a healthy disregard for your survival odds. You control a small but determined ship facing waves of enemy f...

Xenophage: Alien BloodSport is a fighting game that leans heavily into its bizarre premise, featuring grotesque alien combatants battling it out in brutal arenas. It is unapologeti...

Sam and Max Hit the Road is a 1993 adventure classic starring the freelance police duo Sam, a polite detective dog, and Max, an enthusiastic rabbit with absolutely no respect for n...

Skyroads: Xmas Special takes the wonderfully addictive formula of Skyroads and gives it a festive makeover. The basic idea remains unchanged: pilot a futuristic craft along suspend...

Top Gun puts you in the cockpit with one straightforward mission: fly fast, shoot things, and try not to turn your expensive aircraft into modern art. Based on the famous movie, th...

Traffic department 2192 imagines a future where keeping the streets safe apparently requires considerably more shooting than most traffic departments would recommend. The game comb...

Pango is a 1983 maze-action game that belongs to the golden age of simple concepts executed with remarkable confidence. Players navigate enclosed levels while avoiding enemies and ...

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)...

Stormlord is a colorful fantasy platform adventure in which the title character has the rather unpleasant job of rescuing magical creatures and confronting an assortment of hostile...

The Games: Summer Edition is a collection of Olympic-style sporting events that lets you experience the joys of international competition without the inconvenience of actually trai...

In Crime and Punishment, you’re not the criminal—you’re the detective, judge, and executioner rolled into one. Presented as a legal simulation, it tasks you with ...

For those who got hopelessly addicted to the card game inside Final Fantasy VIII, Triple Triad Gold (2000) was like someone saying, “Here, now you can ruin your productivity ...

The Dame Was Loaded is a noir-flavored adventure that throws the player into a world of private investigators, suspicious characters, smoky atmospheres, and the sort of trouble tha...

Operation: Inner Space is a 1994 Windows 3.x game that takes players on a strange journey through the microscopic world inside the human body. Rather than exploring distant planets...

Star Command is a 1988 DOS space strategy game that gives players command of a futuristic vessel and asks them to deal with exploration, combat, crew management, and the many probl...

In Captain Comic 2: Fractured Reality, our fearless spandex-wearing space explorer returns—but this time, he's bouncing between dimensions like a malfunctioning microwave. Th...

The Ancient Art of War at Sea takes the strategic ideas of its predecessor and moves them onto the water, where armies are replaced by fleets and the battlefield becomes considerab...

The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time is a science-fiction adventure built around time travel, investigation, and the slightly alarming realization that history can be ruined by...

Alien Crucible is an ambitious science-fiction role-playing project built around exploration, combat and the discovery of a dangerous alien world. Developed during a period when co...

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...

SWIV 3D takes the classic overhead shooting action of SWIV and throws it into a three-dimensional environment. Released in 1996, it gives you a heavily armed vehicle and a battlefi...

No, not that Battlestar. Battlestar (1996) is more obscure than a reboot that never happened. Set in deep space with a top-down view and UI only a Windows 3.x user could love, it m...

Pacific Islands is a 1992 military strategy game that continues the campaign begun in Battle Isle, transporting players to a chain of tropical battlefields where beautiful scenery ...

Fleet Command invites you to command modern naval forces with the calm authority of someone who definitely read the manual. This is strategy on a grand scale: radar screens glowing...