abandonware games sorted by popularity

In this 1987 DOS game, you delve into a dungeon filled with traps and monsters. Solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and uncover the secrets of the forge. It's like playing Dungeons &...

Legend of the Red Dragon (1989) isn’t so much a traditional game as it is a slice of online history. This BBS door game allowed players to log in, fight monsters, flirt with ...

Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O'Fun, released in 1989 for DOS, is a platformer that looks cheerful but hides a surprisingly mean streak. Set in a circus filled with traps, clowns, and ...

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 ...

Iron Blood (1996, DOS) is the kind of fighting game that makes you wonder if robots really need martial arts lessons. The story is wafer-thin—something about futuristic warri...

In Gnome Alone, you step into the tiny boots of a gnome who really should have picked a quieter profession than “wandering into danger for no clear reason.” The game mi...

Kroz returns, and with it, your CRT monitor’s worst nightmare: ASCII graphics! Return to Kroz takes you back to a time when @ meant “you,” and everything else was...

Imagine if Tetris, Columns, and a pack of highlighters had a baby. That’s Zoop. You’re in the center of the screen, and colorful shapes are marching toward you from all...

Not many people know that the first games created by Sid Meier were flight simulations. Solo Flight was published by MicroProse in 1983 for Commodore 64, Apple II, Atari, and a yea...

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...

Before open-world RPGs let you be anyone, Dusk of the Gods made you a literal Viking demigod with a bad temper and worse manners. Released in 1991, it blends Norse mythology with t...

Long before indie developers made “roguelike” a buzzword, someone decided to fuse Doom with permadeath and ASCII graphics. The result: Doom: The Roguelike (2005). On pa...

Before Michael Bay got his hands on the franchise, Autobots (1989, DOS) offered a more... subtle approach to transforming robot mayhem. Well, not subtle exactly — more like c...

The Third Courier is an abandoned (atypical) adventure / role playing game set in Berlin during the cold war era and, of course, it's a spy game. The Third Courier was developed by...

In Druglord, you’re back on the mean streets, older, wiser, and with slightly better ASCII. Think of it as Drug Wars’s bigger, nastier cousin. You start broke, deal wit...

Inca 2: Wiracocha doubles down on everything its predecessor attempted, for better and occasionally for worse. The sequel streamlines some mechanics while expanding the universe, l...

Hocus Pocus is the kind of platformer that seems to run on pure sugar and cheerful chaos. You play as a young wizard with more enthusiasm than common sense, bouncing through colorf...

Move aside, Jurassic Park—Dinopark Tycoon (1993, DOS) gave kids everywhere the chance to run their very own dinosaur zoo without the risk of being eaten alive. This education...

Clyde is no hero—he's just a guy in a helmet trying to jump through castles and avoid death by... everything. Clyde's Adventure is a charming little platformer that dares to ...

Imagine a game where minesweeper meets viral chaos—Chain Reaction (1996) isn’t quite that, but it is a fast-paced puzzle-action hybrid where things blow up in neat litt...