abandonware games sorted by popularity

Released in 1990, Les Manley in: Search for the King introduces players to an offbeat adventure full of comedy, quirky characters, and classic point-and-click puzzles. Les embarks ...

Murder in the Atlantic takes the classic locked-room mystery and places it aboard a luxury ocean liner, where a murder turns an elegant voyage into an investigation filled with sus...

LHA is one of those utilities that may look humble until you remember how important file compression was in the DOS era. The program is an archiver designed to compress files and b...

Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego? sends players across the continent in pursuit of Carmen and her increasingly slippery gang of thieves. The basic formula is wonderfully effectiv...

Super 3-D Noah's Ark is an unusual first-person shooter that takes the familiar Wolfenstein-style formula and gives it an extremely unexpected biblical makeover. Instead of battlin...

The Simpsons: Bart’s House of Weirdness is what happens when a platform game decides to take a holiday inside a surreal cartoon fever dream. You control Bart through two wild...

Arnie 2 is the unofficial Schwarzenegger sim where you run around shirtless with guns bigger than your torso, blowing up helicopters, bunkers, and bad guys in increasingly ridiculo...

Rules of Engagement 2 builds on its predecessor's space-command formula with a larger and more sophisticated strategic experience. Players manage fleets, plan operations, assign sh...

The sequel nobody expected but everyone button-mashed through. Yie Ar Kung Fu 2 adds more characters, more chaos, and less coherence. This time you’re Lee (no relation to Bru...

What happens when a basketball game forgets about realism and goes full cartoon? Basket Master (1990), that’s what. This Spanish-developed DOS gem pits two oddly animated bal...

Arnhem is the kind of wargame where you spend more time reading hex maps than shooting anything. It’s all about recreating Operation Market Garden — you know, that WWII...

Spy vs Spy 3: Arctic Antics is a 1988 action game featuring the wonderfully destructive rivalry between the two monochrome spies from the classic comic strip. This time the ridicul...

Wordtris takes the familiar falling-block puzzle formula and replaces the usual shapes with letters, turning a game of spatial arrangement into a frantic vocabulary exercise. Block...

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...

The original Crusader: No Remorse sets the tone for the series: brutal, explosive, and unapologetically action-focused. You’re a rogue operative taking on a dystopian corpora...

In Moonmist (1986), you’re invited to a spooky English castle where, naturally, murder and mystery are on the menu. This Infocom text adventure mixes romance, ghost stories, ...

Faces Tris 3 (1990) takes a familiar concept and gives it a slightly unsettling twist. Yes, it’s a falling-blocks puzzle game, but instead of abstract shapes, you’re st...

Solar Hockey League is a 1992 DOS sports game that takes the basic idea of hockey and sends it into a futuristic setting. Instead of conventional ice rinks, players compete in a sc...

Ever wanted to combine your love for trivia with Old Testament knowledge and 256-color DOS graphics? Bible Builder is here to test your biblical memory one verse at a time. It's li...

Shard of Spring (1987, DOS) is a role-playing adventure from an era when mapping dungeons on graph paper was practically mandatory. You assemble a party and set out on a quest fill...

Beyond Divinity is an action RPG developed by Larian Studios and released in 2004 as the direct sequel to Divine Divinity. It builds on its predecessor’s isometric, real-time...

Time and Magik: The Trilogy collects three fantasy adventures into one package, offering a substantial journey through magical worlds filled with puzzles, strange characters and th...

Classic Concentration brings the Alex Trebek game show to DOS, complete with low-res puzzles and that addictive memory card-flipping mechanic. Match two elephants, and boom—y...

If you’ve ever stared at a Monopoly board and thought, “This needs more spreadsheets,” then Oligopoly is basically your spiritual home. Released in 1987 for DOS, ...

Shannara (1995, DOS) adapts the beloved fantasy world into a point-and-click adventure steeped in prophecy, magic, and earnest heroism. Drawing from the novels by Terry Brooks, it ...

Ever dreamed of a medieval Wall Street where knights swap swords instead of stocks? Knight Exchange turns that fever dream into pixels. Released in 1988 for DOS, this quirky strate...

Beast is ASCII horror at its most gloriously minimal. You’re a brave soul (well, a smiley face) trapped in a dungeon with sentient blobs (the titular beasts) that want you ve...

Despite the baffling title (Book I – Chapter 2, yes, really), this is a charmingly earnest old-school RPG. Think “Ultima clone with extra oatmeal” and you're clos...

Released in 1987, Lords of Conquest is strategy in its most distilled, no-nonsense form. This is a game that drops you onto a map, hands you control of armies, and essentially says...

Published in 1989, Livingstone 2 continues the adventurous exploits of explorer Henry Livingstone through jungles packed with traps, hostile wildlife, and demanding platform challe...