abandonware games sorted by rating

Grave Yardage takes golf, adds ghosts, and somehow makes the whole thing feel like a slightly spooky comedy. In Grave Yardage, you are putting your way through haunted courses wher...

Great Napoleonic Battles is the kind of game that assumes you are ready to command armies and possibly rewrite history before breakfast. In Great Napoleonic Battles, strategy is ev...

Guardians is a science-fiction action game built around the familiar idea that humanity needs someone brave enough to deal with an assortment of hostile forces. The player explores...

Holy Grail is one of those early games that feels like a mysterious artifact itself—intriguing, slightly confusing, and very much a product of its time. Released in 1984, it send...

Hotshot is an arcade-style action game designed around quick reactions and straightforward challenges. The premise is simple enough to understand almost immediately, but succeeding...

Jonny Quest: Curse of the Mayan Warriors turns the familiar animated-adventure setting into a computer game filled with exploration, danger, puzzles, and ancient mysteries. Jonny a...

Kingdom of Kroz is a delightful blend of action, puzzle solving, and exploration that quickly became one of the defining entries in the famous Kroz series. Armed with limited resou...

Legend of the Red Dragon (1989) isn’t so much a traditional game as it is a slice of online history. This BBS door game allowed players to log in, fight monsters, flirt with ...

Released in 1993, Litil Divil follows the misadventures of Mutt, a rather clumsy little devil determined to prove himself in the underworld. The game combines platforming, puzzles,...

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...

Lynx is a text-based web browser that became famous for doing something that sounds almost impossible to younger computer users: browsing the World Wide Web without displaying pict...

Not every game involves saving kingdoms or defeating monsters, and Magic: The Gathering Interactive Encyclopedia proudly embraces a different mission. This software serves as a com...

Math Cad 2.5 is a mathematical computing package from an era when serious technical calculations were increasingly moving from paper and calculators onto personal computers. It pro...

Meantime is one of those fascinating lost adventures that has become more interesting precisely because players never got the chance to experience the finished game. Designed by th...

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 ...

Moraff's Morejongg takes the familiar tile-matching concept of Mahjongg Solitaire and expands it with a broad selection of layouts, variations, and challenging puzzles. The basic i...

Nitemare 3D is a 1994 first-person shooter that takes the basic idea of exploring dark corridors and adds monsters, weapons, magic, and enough supernatural unpleasantness to make t...

Noctis is less of a "game" and more of a meditative ritual performed through DOS interface, with fonts so pixelated they might just be ancient runes. You play as a silent explorer ...

Infocom really went off the rails with Nord and Bert, and bless them for it. This is a text adventure not about dragons or spaceships, but about puns. Yes, literal wordplay puzzles...

Oxyd Extra is a puzzle adventure centered on exploration, pattern recognition, and manipulating objects in increasingly elaborate environments. The player controls a small ball thr...

Paladin 2 is a fantasy strategy and role-playing game where commanding troops and managing a growing force are just as important as swinging a sword. The player takes control of a ...

PC Pool brings the familiar game of billiards to the computer with a straightforward approach that focuses on physics, positioning, and the eternal question of why that perfectly o...

QBasic 1.1 is Microsoft's approachable programming environment for DOS and one of the easiest ways an entire generation learned that computers could be told exactly what to do. It ...

Racter is one of the more unusual pieces of software from the early home-computer era: an experimental text-generation program designed to produce apparently original prose. Rather...

Rebound is a 1985 DOS game built around simple arcade-style mechanics and quick reactions. Its straightforward design reflects an era when developers could turn a basic physical co...

Sarakon is a 1991 DOS puzzle game centered around manipulating pieces on a board to create matches and clear obstacles. The basic rules are easy to understand, but the real challen...

Shamus is a maze action game developed by William Mataga and published by Synapse Software in 1982. The game became popular on various home computer platforms of the early 1980s. I...

Swap is a puzzle game built around a wonderfully simple idea: rearrange things until the board behaves itself. Released in 1992, it challenges the player with increasingly tricky a...

Tomahawk is an early helicopter flight simulation that puts the player behind the controls of a military aircraft and expects them to take the job rather seriously. Navigation, wea...

Traffic department 2192 imagines a future where keeping the streets safe apparently requires considerably more shooting than most traffic departments would recommend. The game comb...