abandonware games sorted by popularity

Before Virtua Tennis, there was this: 4D Sports Tennis, where physics and pixels politely shake hands and then forget why they were introduced. Released in 1990 for DOS, this game ...

Released in 1988, Dream Zone was a surreal adventure where you explore your own subconscious after being sucked into a dream machine. It’s colorful, strange, and often unsett...

Merchant Colony turns the romantic idea of building a trading empire into a surprisingly detailed exercise in logistics, commerce, and calculated risk. Players establish colonies, ...

Dark Designs 2: Closing the Gate picks up right where the first game left off, with your party stumbling into yet another world-threatening mess. The stakes are higher, the enemies...

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...

Wipeout is a futuristic racing game built around speed, aggressive competition, and vehicles that apparently have no interest whatsoever in ordinary road safety. The anti-gravity c...

Crossfire is what happens when you throw a tank into a maze, give it infinite ammo, and tell it to go wild. Released in 1982, it’s all about twitch reflexes and precise shoot...

If Catacomb Abyss was “Doom for wizards,” then Catacomb Armageddon is “Doom with a Halloween costume budget.” Bigger levels, more enemies, and slightly more...

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...

La Grande Armée (1991) returns to Napoleonic warfare, but with a sharper focus on military tactics than imperial administration. This strategy game puts you in charge of mas...

CHAMP Pac-em is a Pac-Man-inspired arcade game built around the familiar pleasure of navigating mazes while collecting items and avoiding enemies. Anyone who has ever confidently e...

Transworld is an old-school strategy title that offers a broad economic and organizational challenge, asking players to manage resources and make decisions within a simulated world...

Metal Gear introduces the legendary Solid Snake to computer players in a stealth adventure built around infiltration rather than brute force. Sneaking past guards, gathering intell...

Released in 1994 (long after it originally debuted on other platforms), Ant Attack! is what you get when you mix isometric graphics, giant ants, and questionable urban planning. Yo...

Rome: Pathway to Power is a 1993 DOS adventure that places players in the world of ancient Rome, combining exploration, puzzle solving, historical atmosphere, and character interac...

Beyond Good and Evil is a stylish action-adventure built around exploration, photography, investigation and a conspiracy threatening the world of Hillys. Players control Jade, a re...

Starglider is a 1986 science-fiction action game that combines fast flying with shooting, exploration, and a surprisingly open environment. Players pilot a futuristic craft across ...

Ka-50 Hokum drops players into the cockpit of one of the Soviet Union's most intimidating attack helicopters and expects them to earn their wings the hard way. This is not an arcad...

Ultrabots pits customizable robots against each other in tactical, turn-based combat that rewards planning over reflexes. Before battles even begin, you tinker endlessly with your ...

ShadowForce (1994, DOS) is what happens when someone decides subtlety is overrated and replaces it with explosions. This tactical action romp drops you into a near-future mess of m...

ELIZA, created in the mid-1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, was one of the first computer programs to simulate human conversation. Designed as a natural language processing demons...

Trying to describe Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1991) as a “normal” game is impossible—because nothing about it is normal. It’s a fever dream in pixe...

Little-known but oddly captivating, Kurtan (1990, DOS) feels like someone’s ambitious homebrew fantasy experiment gone right. You play a wandering warrior exploring a pixelat...

SWIV 3D takes the classic overhead shooting action of SWIV and throws it into a three-dimensional environment. Released in 1996, it gives you a heavily armed vehicle and a battlefi...

TomeNET is a multiplayer roguelike that takes the old-school Angband formula and turns it into something considerably more sociable, dangerous, and unpredictable. Instead of wander...

Released in 1994, Lollypop stars an energetic young heroine armed with candy-themed determination as she jumps through vibrant platforming stages packed with enemies and hidden sec...

The Hunt for Red October is a Cold War submarine game based on Tom Clancy's famous novel, combining naval strategy, stealth, navigation, and tense encounters beneath the ocean. The...

Virtual Reality Studio is a DOS-era development tool aimed at creating interactive three-dimensional environments at a time when virtual reality was still surrounded by science-fic...

IndyCar Racing is a racing simulation video game developed by Papyrus Design Group and published by Virgin Interactive. Released in 1993 for MS-DOS, it marked a significant step fo...

Wizard's Crown is a classic fantasy role-playing game that gives players a party of adventurers, a dangerous world, and a generous supply of reasons to regret entering the nearest ...