abandonware games sorted by popularity

Educational software rarely tries to reinvent entertainment, but Learn The Alphabet, released in 1993, manages to teach young players while keeping the experience cheerful and appr...

WinFrotz is a Windows implementation of Frotz, an interpreter designed to run classic Infocom-style interactive fiction using Z-machine story files. Instead of providing one specif...

Everyone’s favorite egg hero returns in Kwik Snax Dizzy (1993, DOS), a fast-paced puzzle game where reflexes and planning matter more than cholesterol levels. You’ll pu...

F40 Pursuit Simulator takes a different approach by putting you in the cockpit of a fictional high-tech interceptor designed for one job: catching bad guys. Instead of large-scale ...

Project Neptune is a 1989 DOS strategy game that takes players into a futuristic underwater conflict where careful planning is the key to victory. Players command forces in a scien...

Grandmaster Chess is not here to hold your hand, compliment your moves, or pretend that losing is part of the fun. In Grandmaster Chess, you are up against a computer that takes it...

Guardians of Infinity: to Save Kennedy is the sort of time-travel adventure that casually suggests you might want to prevent one of the most infamous assassinations in history befo...

Russian Front 2: The Kursk Campaign is a 1990 DOS strategy game focused on one of the largest armored battles of World War II. Players command forces during the Battle of Kursk, ma...

FoxBASE 2 is a database development system from the early years of DOS computing, part of the family of tools that helped transform personal computers into practical information-ma...

Postal is a deliberately provocative top-down action game that throws the player into a bleak world of violence, paranoia, and very questionable decision-making. You control the Po...

Ikari Warriors 2: Victory Road in 1988 continued the tradition of heroic soldiers storming impossible odds while carrying enough ammunition to challenge basic physics. This sequel ...

Thunderhawk AH-73M is a helicopter combat simulation that gives players control of a heavily armed attack helicopter and a collection of dangerous missions. Unlike a simple arcade ...

Stormbringer: Elric of Melnibone brings Michael Moorcock's dark fantasy world to the computer, placing the player in the role of Elric, the tragic albino sorcerer and emperor whose...

Diabolika is a dark, atmospheric adventure with a taste for supernatural trouble and gloomy surroundings. The game places you in a world where strange events are normal and apparen...

In Black Gold (1989), you're in the cutthroat world of oil barons. It’s like Dallas, but with more charts and fewer cowboy hats. You build rigs, negotiate deals, and try to o...

Countdown to Doom is an early interactive fiction adventure in which the player must explore a dangerous environment, solve puzzles, collect useful objects, and stay alive long eno...

Ultimate Domain blends real-time strategy with space opera flair, inviting players to conquer the galaxy one cautious decision at a time. You manage fleets, resources, and diplomac...

Pole Chudes: Capital Show adapts the popular word-guessing television format into a computer game, challenging players to uncover hidden words by selecting letters. The basic conce...

Kingdoms of Germany places players in charge of managing territories within medieval Germany, blending historical strategy with political decision-making and military planning. Suc...

Forget modern physics—Caverns of Kroz lets you destroy walls with whips. Yes, whips. This 1989 ASCII masterpiece from Apogee is part puzzle, part action, and all danger. You ...

Subbuteo brings the famous tabletop football game to the computer, attempting to capture the peculiar magic of flicking tiny players around a pitch without requiring an actual dini...

For those who think snooker is too posh and billiards too French, there's Archer Maclean's Pool, the most ‘90s way to simulate the timeless art of arguing over whether that s...

Paperboy 2 expands the original concept by introducing new routes, additional hazards, and even more opportunities for suburban chaos. Delivering newspapers remains the central obj...

Released in 1990, Dragon Strike dared to combine the wonder of Dungeons & Dragons with the thrill of first-person flight simulation. Yes, instead of piloting jets, you piloted ...

Toonstruck is a lavishly produced adventure game built around a wonderfully strange premise: a live-action character finds himself trapped inside a cartoon world that desperately n...

The sequel nobody expected but everyone button-mashed through. Yie Ar Kung Fu 2 adds more characters, more chaos, and less coherence. This time you’re Lee (no relation to Bru...

Rawcopy is a straightforward DOS utility designed around copying data, with the sort of focused functionality that was common among command-line tools of the period. Rather than at...

Welcome to Los Angeles, where crime runs rampant and your job is to bring the chaos down with nothing but surveillance skills and a stern attitude. L.A. Crackdown puts you in the s...

Dragonflight (1991) was a German RPG that dared to think big—party-based adventuring, sprawling maps, and a proper fantasy plot. It played like a love letter to Ultima with i...

MegaRace is a futuristic racing game that combines high-speed driving with an unusually strong dose of television-show theatrics. Races take place on strange tracks filled with obs...