abandonware games sorted by popularity

Blade Warrior (1991) is a side-scrolling beat 'em up that looks like it was illustrated entirely in heavy metal album covers. You’re a silhouette of rage, cutting through dem...

Guilty from 1995 is a moody point-and-click adventure that seems to have majored in brooding. You step into a murder investigation drenched in rain-soaked atmosphere and existentia...

The Shadows of Mordor is a dark fantasy adventure that feels like a lost chapter from an old-school Tolkien-inspired novel. You explore a grim and dangerous world filled with monst...

Oil's Well is an action-puzzle game released by Sierra On-Line in 1983/84. It was originally made for platforms like the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and MS-DOS, but was la...

Dangerous Streets is a fighting game that clearly wanted to be the next Street Fighter—and instead became a cult oddity. The character roster is bizarre, the animations oddly...

Back in 1985, Cavequest asked: what if you mixed ASCII graphics with deadly bats and claustrophobia? The answer: a punishingly hard maze crawler that’ll have you screaming at...

In Escape from Dr. Colosso, you find yourself trapped in the lair of a mad scientist whose idea of interior design seems to be “danger first, safety never.” It’s ...

Clyde is no hero—he's just a guy in a helmet trying to jump through castles and avoid death by... everything. Clyde's Adventure is a charming little platformer that dares to ...

In Armor Alley, you command a helicopter in a warzone that looks like a side-scrolling office meeting gone wrong. It’s strategy meets action: you must manage resources, deplo...

In this 1987 DOS game, you delve into a dungeon filled with traps and monsters. Solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and uncover the secrets of the forge. It's like playing Dungeons &...

What happens when a basketball game forgets about realism and goes full cartoon? Basket Master (1990), that’s what. This Spanish-developed DOS gem pits two oddly animated bal...

James Clavell's Shogun, a text adventure game developed by Infocom and released in 1989. Infocom was known for its interactive fiction games, and "James Clavell's Shogun" was one o...

It’s 1990, and you’re sitting at your DOS PC playing Accordion, a game that somehow turns solitaire into something slower and more passive-aggressive. It’s not fl...

Dominium (1992) is an ambitious mix of real-time strategy and empire management, though perhaps “ambitious” is just another word for “slightly overwhelming.&rdquo...

Released in 1995 for DOS, Zorlim's Arcade Volleyball is what happens when someone decides regular volleyball isn’t chaotic enough. Picture stick figures with the agility of c...

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...

A loving parody of science fiction tropes, EGA Trek takes obvious inspiration from Star Trek and runs with it, humor first. You command a starship, making decisions that range from...

Electranoid takes the classic Breakout formula, feeds it too much caffeine, and then turns the speed dial to “panic.” This 1995 DOS version is all about reflexes, power...

Acrobat Reader was the first of a family of application software developed by Adobe Inc. to view, create, manipulate, print and manage Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Acrobat...