abandonware games sorted by popularity

Gnome Ranger is an abandoned fantasy adventure game, developed and published by Level 9 Computing in 1987 for DOS. Gnome Ranger was designed by Peter Austin who also designed the s...

From the dusty archives of 1995 DOS gaming comes Zorro, a side-scrolling platformer that asks the question: what if the legendary masked hero had the reflexes of a hungover sloth? ...

Part racing game, part endurance test, African Trail Simulator dares you to hop on a pixel bike and brave the wild. You’ll encounter hostile terrain, wildlife, and the occasi...

Released in 1990, Air Strike USA is what you'd get if Top Gun had a baby with a Saturday morning cartoon. You pilot a heavily armed jet through side-scrolling skies, shooting down ...

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 ...

Skifree is an adorable downhill romp… at least until the monster shows up. You start by zipping peacefully through flags and jumps, enjoying the zen simplicity of early Wind...

In Air Force Commander (1992), you don’t just fly planes - you run the whole air force. Think of it as being a general with a spreadsheet addiction. Assign squadrons, manage ...

Tempest 2000 is a video game developed by Llamasoft and published by Atari Corporation. It was released in 1994 for DOS, Mac, the Atari Jaguar console, etc. Tempest 2000 is an enha...

Aka Starglider 2 with an attitude, Revenge of Defender (or Defender of the Crown’s evil twin in name only) is a 3D space shooter where your main enemy is not the aliens&mdash...

Based on the cult fantasy novels by Roger Zelazny, 9 Princes in Amber is a 1985 text adventure that assumes two things: you’ve read the books, and you enjoy typing things lik...

Take Eddie Murphy’s swagger, remove the charm, add some DOS chiptunes, and you get Beverly Hills Cop—a game adaptation that asks: “What if being a wisecracking de...

In 1990, strategy games were still figuring out how serious they wanted to be, and Frontline sits comfortably in that experimental phase. This DOS title drops players into a tactic...

Ah, Bob Winner (1986, DOS), the game that asks: what if Indiana Jones had a cousin who got lost in a side-scroller? You play as the titular Bob, an adventurer who walks like he&rsq...

In Chicago 90, you either play as the cops or the crooks in a top-down, crime-infested, vaguely Windy City-esque setting. Think of it as a proto-GTA with more sirens and fewer mora...

Ulises is a mythological adventure that wears its classical inspiration proudly, even when the technology struggles to keep up. Drawing loosely from Homer’s Odyssey, the game...