abandonware games sorted by popularity

Titans of Steel: Warring Suns is a tactical role-playing game where enormous machines settle arguments in the least environmentally friendly way possible. Players command teams of ...

Turbo Gomoku takes the ancient Japanese board game Gomoku and gives it a suitably computerised makeover. The rules are wonderfully simple: players place stones on a grid and attemp...

Music Construction Set is an influential early music composition program that lets users create, edit, and arrange musical pieces on a personal computer. Rather than simply playing...

Monuments of Mars (1991) is one of those puzzle-platformers where patience is less a virtue and more a survival tool. You’re stranded on Mars, exploring alien ruins filled wi...

The Train Escape to Normandy is a wartime strategy game built around one of history's most dangerous occupations: trying to survive military operations while trains, soldiers and e...

The Feeble Files is a wonderfully odd comedy adventure following Feeble, an ordinary-looking alien whose life becomes considerably less ordinary after he gets caught up in a conspi...

Sierra Championship Boxing is a 1985 boxing simulation that brings the sport into the world of early computer gaming. Players can step into the ring, choose tactics, manage their f...

Trantor: The Last Stormtrooper is a tough little action game that drops you into a ruined city with one very straightforward job: survive. You play as a lone soldier wandering thro...

Formula One (1994) approaches racing with a slightly more accessible grin than its stern predecessors. It still wants you to care about apexes and braking zones, but it’s hap...

Up Periscope! from 1988 lets you take command of a submarine, which sounds exciting until you realize just how much responsibility that entails. Managing depth, speed, and position...

Off Shore Warrior is a 1988 action game that combines military combat with the distinctly unusual setting of offshore environments. Players take control of a heavily armed vehicle ...

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...

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...

Renegade Legion Interceptor is a 1990 DOS space combat simulation set in the futuristic Renegade Legion universe. Players pilot an advanced spacecraft through dangerous missions, m...

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 ...

It’s Boggle (1990, DOS), the digital version of everyone’s favorite game where you try to spell long words while your friend keeps shouting “DOG” over and o...

Highway Hunter combines driving and shooting in a way that feels both chaotic and entertaining. The concept is simple, survive while dealing with whatever the road throws at you, b...

Meteors takes the classic asteroid-blasting formula and turns it into an addictive test of reflexes and spatial awareness. Players pilot a small spacecraft through increasingly cro...

The last entry in Infocom’s Enchanter trilogy, Spellbreaker is where the training wheels come off. It’s unforgiving, cryptic, and expects you to understand spellcraft l...

Lynx is a text-based web browser that became famous for doing something that sounds almost impossible to younger computer users: browsing the World Wide Web without displaying pict...

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...

FoxBASE 2 is a database development system from the early years of DOS computing, part of the family of tools that helped transform personal computers into practical information-ma...

No Greater Glory is a 1991 strategy game that takes players into the world of military command and asks them to make the decisions that determine whether an army achieves victory o...

Fox Ranger is a side-scrolling shooter that wastes no time explaining itself—because lasers are self-explanatory. You pilot a sleek craft through swarms of enemies with the s...

Toyota Celica GT Rally puts the player behind the wheel of Toyota's famous rally machine and focuses on the rougher, dirtier side of motorsport. Instead of smooth circuits and pred...

Rescue Rover 2 expands on the puzzle-focused gameplay of its predecessor with new environments, challenges, and hazards for the small robotic hero to overcome. Released in 1991, it...

Ever wondered what it’s like to fly inches from another jet’s tail while defying both gravity and common sense? Blue Angels: Formation Flight Simulation (1989, DOS) tri...

The original Crusader: No Remorse sets the tone for the series: brutal, explosive, and unapologetically action-focused. You’re a rogue operative taking on a dystopian corpora...

Cirque de Zale is a point-and-click adventure game released in 2004, developed by Rebecca Clements as a freeware title. Created using the Adventure Game Studio (AGS) engine, the ga...

No, not that Battlestar. Battlestar (1996) is more obscure than a reboot that never happened. Set in deep space with a top-down view and UI only a Windows 3.x user could love, it m...