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 & Dragons, but with more puzzles and fewer dice ro...

Chicago, 1920s. You’ve got a tommy gun, a fedora, and a score to settle. Capone is part gangster sim, part shooting gallery, and part fever dream. The graphics are muddy, the gameplay’s clunky, and the story’s to...

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 confusing. You drive around a blocky city, fight va...

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 warriors clashing in metallic arenas—but the fun ...

In BC's Quest for Tires, you play a loincloth-wearing caveman who’s riding a unicycle through danger, because apparently that’s how courtship worked in 1984. The goal? Rescue your cave-girlfriend from some surprisingly...

18th Airborne is what happens when a military recruitment pamphlet and a tactical shooter have a baby. You’re thrown into the boots of a paratrooper with a mission, a gun, and maybe a vague idea of what’s going on. The...

It’s Pac-Man, except it’s… not. Cap Man is a low-budget clone with just enough charm to avoid immediate deletion. You’ve got the dots, the ghosts, the power-ups—but everything feels slightly off, lik...

Top Gun is an abandoned flight combat simulation game developed by Ocean Software and released by Thunder Mountain in 1987 for DOS and a number of other 8 bit platforms. As the title suggests, Top Gun is based on the movie of the ...

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 paper, it sounds ridiculous—text characters re...

If medieval politics, giant fire-breathing monsters, and backstabbing your allies sound fun, then Gemfire will keep you busy. Released in 1992, this Koei strategy game throws you into a kingdom divided into squabbling provinces. Y...

Welcome to the skies of World War II, where dogfights are fast, fuel is low, and you probably forgot to raise your landing gear. Battlehawks 1942 (1988) is a flight sim with just enough realism to make you sweat and just enough ar...