abandonware games sorted by popularity

Sounds ominous, right? In Choose an Enemy, you’re given exactly that: a list of foes to annihilate in turn-based combat. It’s like a dinner menu, but instead of appetiz...

Side Arms: Hyper Dyne is a side-scrolling shoot-'em-up arcade game developed and published by Capcom in 1986 and later ported on various platforms. Players control a "mobilsui...

Black Monday (1987) combines economic panic with the thrill of—wait for it—spreadsheet navigation. It's like Wolf of Wall Street without the fun, drugs, or DiCaprio. Yo...

Space 1889 (1990, DOS) is steampunk before steampunk was cool. Based on the tabletop RPG, it sends you to an alternate Victorian era where the British Empire has expanded — t...

Teen Agent is a charming, tongue-in-cheek adventure about a teenager recruited to save the world because, well, why not? With its colorful art, witty dialogue, and delightfully abs...

Daemonsgate is what happens when someone decides RPGs need more moral ambiguity, political intrigue, and sprawling maps that require an actual notebook to navigate. You’re to...

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...

Atlantis: The Lost Tales is a graphic adventure game developed by Cryo Interactive and released in 1997. It is the first in a series of games set around the legendary lost city of ...

Released in 1995, AIV Networks dares to ask: what if the real hero of industrialization was... logistics? Here, you’re not conquering worlds - you’re routing freight. B...

Deadly Racer is basically what happens when someone at the office said, “What if racing, but everyone might die?” Released in 1994 for DOS, it’s a fast-paced, rou...

Back in 1996, Macromedia Flash Player was like that mysterious new kid at school who suddenly knew how to juggle, ride a unicycle, and solve a Rubik’s Cube—all at the s...

In Infidel, you play a not-so-noble adventurer whose moral compass is spinning like a broken ceiling fan. As a treasure-hungry explorer poking around an ancient Egyptian tomb, you ...

Released in 1984, Zyll is what happens when a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master learns to code and decides to build a text adventure inside a coffee machine. There are no graph...

Dungeon of Shalan is one of those games that greets you with the words “You awaken in a dark room” and then proceeds to make that darkness your entire reality. Released...

Conqueror is what happens when a tank simulator and an arcade game go on a date and forget their purpose. You drive a tank in a pseudo-3D landscape, blow up stuff, and command squa...

Infocom really went off the rails with Nord and Bert, and bless them for it. This is a text adventure not about dragons or spaceships, but about puns. Yes, literal wordplay puzzles...

With a title like Pray for Death, you know you’re not signing up for a cheerful platformer. This is a fighting game with a gothic, heavy-metal aesthetic that screams 1996. It...

If Shakespeare wrote video games and then decided, “You know what this needs? A parser and some pixelated drama,” you'd get Avon. In this interactive fiction gem from 1...