abandonware games sorted by popularity

Football fans eager to relive one of Manchester United's greatest achievements found plenty to enjoy in Manchester United: The Double. Combining management elements with on-pitch a...

Zeitgeist — also known as Jupiter Strike in some markets — is a PlayStation-era space shooter that boldly says: "Let’s do Star Fox, but with less personality and ...

In Battle Master (1991), you play as a heavily armored murder-hobo leading an army across a fantasy world that really doesn’t want you there. It’s part action-RPG, part...

A remake of the arcade classic, CHAMP Asteroids lets you relive the joy of spinning wildly in space and smashing rocks with a tiny triangle-shaped ship. It’s like cosmic road...

Syberia is a beautifully atmospheric adventure game that follows Kate Walker, a New York lawyer whose ordinary business trip turns into an extraordinary journey across a strange an...

Before there were AAA games with 100GB installs, there was Amulet of Yendor, a rogue-like so old-school it might as well come with a floppy disk and a sandwich bag of D&D dice....

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...

Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption is a dark action RPG that combines gothic horror, character development, and a surprisingly complicated vampire social life. You play Christof ...

Super Cauldron is a platform adventure with a distinctly magical flavor, sending the player through colorful environments filled with enemies, hazards, and the usual assortment of ...

Football Fanatic (1998, DOS) is pure arcade chaos dressed in cleats. It doesn’t care much for the finer tactical nuances of the sport; it wants you sprinting, tackling, and g...

Mind Mirror is an unusual piece of software that explores personality, self-reflection, and the workings of the mind rather than offering traditional action or adventure gameplay. ...

Holiday World Tycoon is the sort of game that feels like it was designed after someone spent a bit too long staring at a postcard rack in an airport gift shop and thought, &ld...

Menace is a fast-paced side-scrolling shooter from the creators of DMA Design, throwing players into a hostile alien world where everything seems determined to explode. Armed with ...

Fidelity Chessmaster 2100, released in 1989 for DOS, is chess with a very clear mission: beat you, patiently and without mercy. At the time, it was a serious achievement in compute...

Elevator is one of those early arcade-style games that sounds boring on paper and becomes oddly stressful in practice. You’re navigating elevators, rescuing people, and avoid...

Compilation titles often feel like a random pile of games tossed together with minimal ceremony, but Future Classics Collection from 1990 tries to do something slightly more ambiti...

Released in 1990, Disc feels like a relic from a parallel universe where Frisbee is the most important sport in history. The game is minimalist to a fault: you throw discs, catch d...

Tennis Elbow is where tennis simulation starts to get serious, almost suspiciously so. The physics are detailed, the controls precise, and the learning curve steep enough to scare ...

Star General is a 1996 turn-based strategy game that takes the familiar mechanics of military campaigns and moves them into a science-fiction setting. Players command futuristic ar...

Crystal Caves is a bright, cheerful platformer starring Mylo Steamwitz, an entrepreneur whose business plan involves raiding dangerous alien caves for profit. The levels are full o...

Soccer Kid is a colorful 1995 platform game in which football becomes an unlikely weapon against a rather unusual collection of villains. The player controls a young soccer enthusi...

The Final Battle is a fantasy strategy game built around the sort of grand confrontation that its title promises, with armies, heroes, enemies, and a world apparently determined to...

Starlord is a 1987 science-fiction strategy game centered on exploration, expansion, and competition among rival forces in space. Players must manage resources, develop their posit...

Xiphos is a space shooter that mixes straightforward mechanics with a slightly more tactical approach, encouraging players to think as well as react. It is not overly complex, but ...

Educational games often struggle to balance learning with entertainment, but Mario is Missing! takes an unusual approach by sending Luigi around the world to rescue his famous brot...

Hot on the heels of the first, Caverns of Kroz 2 (also 1989) doesn’t mess with the formula—it sharpens it. More puzzles, more monsters, more reasons to scream at fallin...

Over the Reich is a 1996 strategy game set during the Second World War, focusing on aerial operations and the difficult decisions involved in planning military campaigns. Players c...

If you’ve ever wondered what Bill Gates was doing before becoming a household name, Donkey BAS holds the answer: programming a game about avoiding pixelated donkeys on a high...

FreeDOS Shell provides a command-line environment for FreeDOS, bringing the classic DOS experience to a later generation of computers. Its purpose is wonderfully straightforward: g...