abandonware games sorted by popularity

Hoverforce takes flight combat and wraps it in a futuristic package that feels both ambitious and slightly experimental. Released in 1990, it lets you pilot a hovercraft through mi...

WaxWorks (1992, DOS/Mac) is a horror game that doesn’t just want to scare you—it wants to traumatize you a little. Set in cursed wax museum exhibits, each scenario drop...

Ah, Bob Winner (1986, DOS), the game that asks: what if Indiana Jones had a cousin who got lost in a side-scroller? You play as the titular Bob, an adventurer who walks like he&rsq...

In Ante-Up at The Friday Night Poker Club, you’re not saving the world or slaying dragons — you’re just trying to win a few bucks from a room full of poker-faced ...

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...

Xenocide is an early example of space combat that leans heavily on atmosphere and tension, even if its technical limitations occasionally get in the way. It tries to create a sense...

Black Hole (1993) is a space shooter where you're thrown into the gravitational madness of, you guessed it, a black hole. The physics are wild, the enemies are relentless, and you&...

Conflict is a turn-based war game where you get to play Commander-in-Chief and yell at your virtual generals when things go wrong (which they often do). It's part military sim, par...

In Colosso Revenge (1997, DOS), a giant angry head (presumably Colosso) is back, and it’s not in a forgiving mood. Expect side-scrolling mayhem with explosions, mutant monstr...

Car Builder is less about speed and more about spreadsheets—just with axles. In this 1982 gem, you don’t race cars, you design them. From gear ratios to weight distribu...

Tennis Elbow is where tennis simulation starts to get serious, almost suspiciously so. The physics are detailed, the controls precise, and the learning curve steep enough to scare ...

Part interactive thriller, part newsroom simulator, The President is Missing (1988, DOS) casts you as an investigative journalist trying to unravel a political conspiracy before ev...

Finally, a game where you don’t blast aliens—you launch real people into space, with all the white-knuckled tension of 1960s NASA. Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space i...

Few games from 1994 dared to ask the real question: “What if you gave an axe to someone with absolutely no training and dropped them into a dungeon with the reflexes of a slo...

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...

In Bert and the Snake, you are Bert. And yes, there's a snake. That’s the plot. It’s a maze game from a time when naming conventions were refreshingly honest and graphi...

The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Presto Studios, released in 1995 as a sequel to The Journeyman Project. The Journeyma...