abandonware games sorted by popularity

Roll up, roll up! Circus Attractions turns your PC into a low-resolution big top full of minigames, each one zanier than the last. Think clown juggling, lion taming, and tightrope ...

Few games make you appreciate the aerodynamic potential of a paper airplane quite like Glider 4.0. Set inside a house that feels more like a playground of hazards, you’ll nav...

DuckTales: The Quest for Gold takes everyone’s favorite miserly duck, Scrooge McDuck, and sends him globetrotting for treasure. It’s part platformer, part management si...

Based on the Disney movie that taught us cats can sing, dance, and apparently navigate 1980s New York, Oliver & Company for DOS (1989) is a surprisingly earnest platformer. You...

Time Bandit is a classic top-down arcade-style video game that was released in 1982 for various home computer systems, such as the Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and others. It was dev...

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...

Fleet Sweep takes the high drama of naval warfare and filters it through early-80s minimalism. Think less cinematic spectacle and more abstract tension as you maneuver through trea...

If Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon were a person, it would be that eccentric uncle who insists he once met a genie “for real.” This 1988 Arabian-fantasy adventure m...

Paranormal agents, conspiracy theories, and point-and-click puzzles that would make even a ghost sigh in frustration. Bureau 13 is like The X-Files if Mulder and Scully spent more ...

No relation to Dune (except for being a total rip-off), Arrakis is a homebrew strategy game that feels like a tribute to the sandiest planet in sci-fi. You mine spice, fight vaguel...

Guy Spy and the Crystals of Armageddon is gloriously over-the-top, starring a hero who looks like he walked out of a Saturday morning cartoon and into a global conspiracy. The digi...

The Shadows of Mordor is a dark fantasy adventure that feels like a lost chapter from an old-school Tolkien-inspired novel. You explore a grim and dangerous world filled with monst...

A loving parody of science fiction tropes, EGA Trek takes obvious inspiration from Star Trek and runs with it, humor first. You command a starship, making decisions that range from...

By 1992, Vol. 3 wrapped up the trilogy with even more complex scenarios. At this point, the series had become less of a game and more of an interactive textbook—though that&r...

Released in 1992, Dylan Dog: Murderers brings Italy’s most famous nightmare investigator to the DOS screen with all the moody atmosphere you’d expect. It’s part p...