abandonware games sorted by popularity

Strife from 1996 is a first-person shooter game developed by Rogue Entertainment and published by Velocity, based on the Doom engine. It's often remembered for being one of the ear...

Isle of the Dead is a first-person horror shooter that combines exploration, combat, and a wonderfully grim island setting. You find yourself surrounded by hostile creatures and my...

In Power Drive, rally racing comes with an extra dose of “don’t hit the tree.” It’s all about navigating winding tracks with a sense of timing that borders ...

Star Fleet 1: The War Begins is a 1985 space strategy game inspired by classic television science fiction, putting players in command of a starship during a large-scale conflict. R...

Before AI could annihilate grandmasters, Psion Chess was already humbling humans back in 1985. Available for DOS and Macintosh, this game wasn’t flashy, but it didn’t n...

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...

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...

If you ever looked at regular Tetris and thought, “What this really needs is eye-melting colors and a possible migraine,” then Acid Tetris (1998, DOS) is your jam. It&r...

Trade in your sword and crown for a dice cup in King Graham’s Board Game Challenge. The noble hero of King’s Quest takes a break from slaying dragons to play board game...

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...

In Black Crown (1995), you play as a prince with a very punchable name, trying to reclaim his rightful throne by solving puzzles and dying a lot. It's one of those DOS-era games wh...

Santa's Xmas Caper is a 1993 DOS holiday-themed action game that puts players in the middle of a festive adventure involving Santa Claus and the usual seasonal chaos. Instead of qu...

Turbo Prolog 2.0 is a programming environment built around Prolog, a language particularly associated with artificial intelligence, symbolic reasoning, and rule-based problem solvi...

Rally Championships is a 1994 DOS racing game focused on rally-style competition, where speed alone is not enough to guarantee success. Players must deal with winding tracks, chang...

Zork: Grand Inquisitor is the ultimate swan song for the series—and what a finale it is. Combining laugh-out-loud humor, point-and-click puzzles, and a talking lantern voiced...

Aurora Dibularos is an unusual game with an equally unusual title, presenting a science-fiction setting through a mixture of exploration, action and puzzle-solving. Its world has t...

Alice in Wonderland is a whimsical adventure inspired by Lewis Carroll's famous journey down the rabbit hole. Rather than offering a conventional heroic quest, it places the player...

Released in 1988, Dracula in London was part strategy, part board game, and all atmosphere. You weren’t just staking vampires; you were managing resources, characters, and ti...

With a name like Moonshine Racers (1991), you already know this isn’t about safe driving. You’re an outlaw hauling contraband, racing through rural landscapes while dod...

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 ...

Beast is ASCII horror at its most gloriously minimal. You’re a brave soul (well, a smiley face) trapped in a dungeon with sentient blobs (the titular beasts) that want you ve...

Arachne is a graphical web browser for DOS. Arachne was developed by Michal Polák and released in the early 1990s as a text-mode web browser with limited graphical capabilit...

Released in 1985, _Jet_ is one of those early flight simulators that reminds players how much imagination was required before photorealistic graphics became the norm. Taking contro...

Think you're smart? Arcade Trivia Quiz (1993) is here to humble you with rapid-fire questions about pop culture, history, and whatever else the developers could fit on a floppy dis...

In Search of Dr. Riptide from 1994 is a science-fiction adventure with enough eccentricity to fill several galaxies. Players investigate mysteries, solve puzzles, and generally que...

In Druglord, you’re back on the mean streets, older, wiser, and with slightly better ASCII. Think of it as Drug Wars’s bigger, nastier cousin. You start broke, deal wit...

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 ...

Archery (1985) is what happens when someone says, “Hey, what if we made a bow-and-arrow game with the graphical fidelity of a cave painting?” You shoot arrows. That&rsq...

Guardians: Agents of Justice puts the player in the role of a superhero-style operative tasked with dealing with threats that are considerably less interested in obeying the law. T...

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...