abandonware games sorted by popularity

Beyond Columns is what happens when someone looks at Tetris and says, “What if we made it... slightly fancier?” This match-three puzzle game involves dropping shiny col...

Ever wondered what it’s like to fly inches from another jet’s tail while defying both gravity and common sense? Blue Angels: Formation Flight Simulation (1989, DOS) tri...

The Third Courier is an abandoned (atypical) adventure / role playing game set in Berlin during the cold war era and, of course, it's a spy game. The Third Courier was developed by...

Part interactive thriller, part newsroom simulator, The President is Missing (1988, DOS) casts you as an investigative journalist trying to unravel a political conspiracy before ev...

Here comes another bubble game—but this one packs a punch. Bubble Trouble is a frantic shoot-’em-up where you pop evil bouncing bubbles before they bounce you out of ex...

Stormlord is an abandoned DOS platform game set in a fantasy world, developed and published by Hewson Consultants in 1989 and designed by Raffaele Cecco. There was some controversy...

Based on the popular D&D module, Curse of the Azure Bonds puts you in control of a party of adventurers cursed with magical tattoos that force them into dangerous quests. You&r...

In Cutthroats, you’re a diver hired for a treasure-hunting expedition that’s about to go very wrong. This text adventure from Infocom mixes underwater exploration with ...

NCSA Mosaic was one of the earliest web browsers to appear on the market. It was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illino...

Based on the French comic series, The Quest for the Time-bird (1989, DOS) offers a fantasy adventure full of personality, odd creatures, and enough lore to fill a small library. Th...

Rastan is Conan-the-Barbarian energy distilled into a side-scrolling adventure where your primary verb is “destroy.” The DOS port lacks a bit of arcade sparkle, but the...

Released in 1991, Free D.C.! is one of those games that feels like a time capsule of early PC experimentation. It mixes political satire with arcade-style action, letting you fight...

In Core War Plus, programming isn’t just for making spreadsheets—it’s for virtual combat. You write tiny programs that battle for control of computer memory, turn...

What if the Nazis won? Kronolog: The Nazi Paradox (1993, DOS) takes that nightmare seriously. You play a time traveler trying to fix history, navigating through an oppressive, Orwe...

Black Friday (1983) isn’t about shopping mayhem—though you might wish it were after trying to figure out what’s going on. This early DOS title is part stock marke...