abandonware games sorted by popularity

Superman: The Man of Steel is an action game built around one of the most difficult tasks in gaming: making Superman feel appropriately powerful without making the entire game comp...

Before Football Manager consumed the souls of soccer nerds everywhere, there was Club Football: The Manager. It’s all spreadsheets, transfers, and managing egos with egos. Th...

Frankenstein (1994) leans into its gothic inspiration with an earnest devotion to atmosphere. Drawing from Mary Shelley’s tale, it combines adventure elements with a somber m...

No, it’s not about a guy who holds your groceries. Bagman is a retro-style indie throwback where you’re a pickaxe-wielding convict trying to steal bags of cash from a m...

Jeff Minter's Llamatron 2112, released in 1992, is exactly as gloriously bizarre as its title suggests. Players control an armed llama defending the screen against relentless waves...

Bolo Ball is a DOS game from the mid-1990s. It features a physics-based gameplay where the objective is to knock opponent balls out of an arena. When you start the game, you find y...

There’s something oddly hypnotic about Gapper, a game that feels like it was assembled during a coffee-fueled night by someone who really liked simple mechanics and didn&rsqu...

Arkanoid: Doh It Again revisits the classic brick-breaking formula with the familiar paddle, ball and increasingly fragile-looking collection of blocks. The objective remains wonde...

CHAMP Galagon is a fast arcade-style shooter inspired by the classic formation-based space games of the 1980s. The premise is gloriously uncomplicated: enemies appear in patterns, ...

Industry Giant 2 turns spreadsheets into entertainment, which sounds impossible until you realize how addictive it becomes. Released in 2002, this business simulation asks players ...

Quandaries is a 1997 DOS puzzle game that lives up to its name by presenting players with problems that require thought, experimentation, and occasionally the uncomfortable realiza...

Global Conquest is strategy boiled down to its essentials, offering a streamlined take on world domination that’s easy to pick up but harder to master. You’ll move armi...

Silicon Dreams is a 1986 DOS science-fiction adventure that combines exploration, mystery, and puzzle-solving in a futuristic setting. Players investigate an unusual situation whil...

Back in 1999, Warzone 2100 felt like a glimpse into the future of strategy gaming. Forget endless waves of faceless soldiers; here you could actually design your own tanks and chop...

Power Drift feels like a rollercoaster decided it wanted to be a racing game. The tracks are tilted, twisted, and occasionally seem designed by an architect who had a personal grud...

Golden Oldies: Volume 1 - Computer Software Classics is less a single game and more a time capsule, offering a collection of early titles that remind you just how far gaming has co...

South Park: Cartman's Authoritah is a short action game built around the irreverent world of South Park and, naturally, the enormous personality of Eric Cartman. The gameplay throw...

The sequel to Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch, Return to Ringworld throws you back into Larry Niven’s vast sci-fi universe—except this time, the puzzles are tougher...

Ishido (1990, DOS/Mac) is the digital version of sitting in a Zen garden and realizing you’re terrible at strategy. The game’s premise is simple: place stones on a grid...

Sirwood throws you into a fantasy kingdom where the trees are friendlier than some of the locals. Half strategy, half adventure, it's the kind of game that expects you to think, pl...

In Dark Designs 1: Grelminar’s Staff, you’re thrust into a classic fantasy dungeon crawler with an emphasis on text-driven menus and turn-based combat. It’s like ...

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...

Zork: Grand Inquisitor is the ultimate swan song for the series—and what a finale it is. Combining laugh-out-loud humor, point-and-click puzzles, and a talking lantern voiced...

Round 42 is a 1986 DOS game that offers a compact arcade-style experience built around quick decisions, movement, and increasingly demanding challenges. Its design reflects the str...

If Dungeons of Kairn were a person, it’d be that quiet D&D player who never smiles and always plays lawful evil. Released in 1989, this obscure DOS crawler delivers all t...

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. ...

Creatures 2 takes the strange virtual-pet experiment of its predecessor and makes it considerably more ambitious. The Norns return, complete with their ability to learn, reproduce,...

Released in 1984 for DOS, Felony! is a strange and ambitious early action game that puts you in the role of a criminal on the run. Instead of focusing on a single mechanic, it thro...

Alice in Wonderland is a whimsical adventure inspired by Lewis Carroll's famous journey down the rabbit hole. Rather than offering a conventional heroic quest, it places the player...

Released in 1990, Lightspeed blends space simulation, exploration, and strategic resource management into an ambitious science fiction adventure. Players travel across distant star...