abandonware games sorted by popularity

In 1991, DOS gamers were treated to the weirdest parenting simulator ever: Baby Joe in: Going Home. You play as Baby Joe, an infant inexplicably left to crawl through caves, forest...

Beyond Columns is what happens when someone looks at Tetris and says, “What if we made it... slightly fancier?” This match-three puzzle game involves dropping shiny col...

In Core War Plus, programming isn’t just for making spreadsheets—it’s for virtual combat. You write tiny programs that battle for control of computer memory, turn...

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...

Lords of Doom, released in 1990, wears its dark fantasy influences proudly and with very little restraint. Everything about the game feels intense, from the name to the atmosphere,...

Ah, Dungeons of Kroz, the glorious mess of ASCII characters that somehow became addictive. Created by Apogee in 1989, it’s a fast-paced dungeon adventure where every symbol m...

By 1992, Vol. 3 wrapped up the trilogy with even more complex scenarios. At this point, the series had become less of a game and more of an interactive textbook—though that&r...

Remember those endless, hypnotic tile-matching games before Candy Crush hijacked your aunt’s phone? Cascade was already there, dropping blocks and breaking combos like it inv...

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...

Mech Brigade (1987) is a strategy game that lets you live out your dream of commanding an army of giant robots. Set in a futuristic battlefield, you’re in charge of deploying...

Think of Bass Tour (1992) as the road trip version of virtual fishing. More simulation than arcade, it lets you travel, pick locations, study conditions, and obsess over bait types...

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...