abandonware games sorted by popularity

Unnecessary Roughness takes American football and gives it a slightly rougher, more arcade-like edge. Released in 1993, it doesn’t aim for pure simulation, instead focusing on fa...

Sherman M4 is a 1989 DOS tank combat game centered on the famous American M4 Sherman tank. Players take control of the armored vehicle and face battlefield situations where positio...

Few titles announce their intentions as clearly as Fire Power. This is top-down tank warfare with all the subtle grace of a marching band in a library. You roll into battle, shells...

Moraff's Dungeon of the Unforgiven is a first-person dungeon crawler filled with monsters, exploration, treasure, and the sort of dark corridors that strongly suggest turning aroun...

The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian is a title that feels like it was generated by rolling dice on a fantasy word table, and somehow that’s part of its ...

Super Pinball by Russco is a straightforward computer pinball game that attempts to recreate the noisy, chaotic pleasure of a real machine without requiring a pocket full of coins....

Operation Combat: Computer Battle Game is a 1990 strategy title that brings military conflict to the computer screen in a form designed for players who enjoy planning rather than s...

Paintshow is a DOS graphics program from an era when creating pictures on a computer still felt like a minor act of wizardry. It provides tools for drawing, editing, and manipulati...

Dark Side (1988) is a first-person sci-fi adventure set on a moon orbiting a planet that’s about to be destroyed. No pressure. The gameplay combines exploration with puzzle-s...

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...

Classic Concentration brings the Alex Trebek game show to DOS, complete with low-res puzzles and that addictive memory card-flipping mechanic. Match two elephants, and boom—y...

Rockford: The Arcade Game is a 1987 DOS adaptation of the classic Boulder Dash-style character, combining maze navigation, treasure collecting, falling rocks, and dangerous creatur...

Tracon 2 puts the player in the demanding position of managing air traffic, which sounds peaceful until several aircraft arrive at once and all of them expect you to know exactly w...

Incursion is a modern love letter to classic tactical RPGs, clearly inspired by tabletop rulesets and games like early Fallout. It throws you into a turn-based world where position...

If Lorna were a comic book, it would be the kind your parents warned you about. Based on the Spanish sci-fi heroine by Alfonso Azpiri, this 1990 action-platformer on DOS is a cockt...

The Witness is an early detective adventure that asks the player to investigate a murder at an isolated location while questioning suspects, examining evidence and trying to recons...

World Rally Fever: Born on the Road delivers a straightforward rally experience built around speed, tight corners, and the eternal battle between the driver and the scenery. The ca...

Released in 2003, Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader blends classic role-playing mechanics with a richly imagined alternate history where magic and mythology reshape medieval Europe...

Snack Attack 2 is a 1982 DOS arcade-style game built around a simple but immediately understandable premise: collect food while dealing with hazards and enemies that would rather m...

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,...

Super Huey UH-IX is an early helicopter simulation that places you in the cockpit and asks you to master the wonderfully awkward business of keeping a rotorcraft airborne. The game...

Backgammon brings the ancient board game into the DOS era with a clean focus on dice, tactics and the eternal hope that probability will suddenly become your best friend. The rules...

Super Speed is a straightforward racing game built around one very important concept: going fast. Players take control of racing cars, compete on circuits, and attempt to finish ah...

Based on the fantasy novels by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Death Gate (1994) throws you into an epic, puzzle-heavy adventure. Imagine Myst, but with more dragons and a script ...

The Last Mission is a compact science-fiction action game in which survival depends on flying through dangerous environments, destroying hostile machines, and keeping your spacecra...

Microsoft COBOL is a classic programming environment for one of computing's most enduring business languages. COBOL was designed with practical data processing in mind, and Microso...

ShadowCaster is a 1993 DOS first-person action RPG that blends fantasy, exploration, and combat in a world where the player can transform into different magical creatures. Each for...

In Lost Adventures of Kroz, ASCII characters do all the heavy lifting. No sprites, no polygons — just your imagination and a fearless “@” symbol running for its l...

A gloriously grimy cyberpunk romp, Ranx: The Video Game drops you in a future where technology, attitude, and questionable hygiene coexist in uneasy harmony. Based on the French co...

Music Construction Set is an influential early music composition program that lets users create, edit, and arrange musical pieces on a personal computer. Rather than simply playing...