abandonware games sorted by popularity

Realms of Chaos is a 1995 action platformer that combines fast-paced combat with a colorful fantasy world and a generous dose of old-school difficulty. Players choose between two c...

Dungeons of Kroz 2 didn’t reinvent the wheel—it sharpened it and rolled it over your face. Released the same year as the original, it’s tougher, faster, and even ...

Exterminator, released in 1990, is one of those games that knows exactly what it wants to do and wastes no time doing it. You’re thrown into a top-down action scenario with a...

Originally designed by Cyan, Manhole offers an experience closer to an interactive storybook than a conventional adventure game. Players explore whimsical locations by clicking thr...

Before Football Manager consumed the souls of soccer nerds everywhere, there was Club Football: The Manager. It’s all spreadsheets, transfers, and managing egos with egos. Th...

Released in 1987, Laser Surgeon: The Microscopic Mission offers one of gaming's more unusual premises by shrinking players down for a medical adventure inside the human body. Inste...

Do you find spreadsheets thrilling? Does the idea of profit margins make your heart race? Then Business Simulator is your kind of party. It’s all about running a faceless com...

Gearheads is a colorful puzzle game in which mechanical creatures become the stars of a surprisingly hectic series of challenges. The objective is generally straightforward, but co...

Beyond Divinity is an action RPG developed by Larian Studios and released in 2004 as the direct sequel to Divine Divinity. It builds on its predecessor’s isometric, real-time...

In Taipan for Windows, you’re not a hero, you’re a 19th-century capitalist trying to get rich trading tea, silk, and the occasional bit of opium in the South China Sea....

Creatures is an unusual life-simulation game built around the idea that virtual creatures should actually behave like living things. You hatch small Norns, teach them, feed them, p...

Tetris (Academysoft) from 1996 feels like the classic puzzle formula got a slightly more polished suit but kept the same addictive soul. The gameplay is instantly familiar: blocks ...

Masterblazer (1991) is one of those games that feels like it escaped from a late-night coding session fueled by coffee, crisps, and questionable design decisions — and someho...

Normality is a first-person adventure video game developed by Gremlin Interactive and released in 1996. The game is set in a dystopian future where a totalitarian regime known as t...

The Lost Treasures of Infocom is essentially a library of interactive fiction for players willing to trade spectacular graphics for spectacularly active imaginations. The collectio...

McDonald Land (1992) is one of the strangest brand tie-ins ever to grace DOS, and that’s saying something. You play as Ronald McDonald himself, jumping across colorful platfo...

Sports games in 1990 weren’t exactly realistic, but Double Dribble made a surprisingly good attempt. This Konami basketball title brought fast-paced, side-scrolling action to...

Sam and Max Hit the Road is a 1993 adventure classic starring the freelance police duo Sam, a polite detective dog, and Max, an enthusiastic rabbit with absolutely no respect for n...

Skyroads: Xmas Special takes the wonderfully addictive formula of Skyroads and gives it a festive makeover. The basic idea remains unchanged: pilot a futuristic craft along suspend...

Ninja is a 1986 action game that wastes very little time explaining the job description. You are a ninja, there are enemies, and they would prefer that you stop being quite so succ...

So, you think you know Star Trek? The Next Generation – Trivia (1990, DOS) is here to prove you wrong. This is a straight-up quiz game, packed with hundreds of questions rang...

Sword of Honour is an action-oriented medieval adventure that mixes swordplay, exploration, and dangerous encounters into a compact old-school package. Released in 1993, it sends t...

Star Wars: Dark Forces is a 1995 first-person shooter that brought the Star Wars universe into a darker, more action-oriented setting. Players control Kyle Katarn, a mercenary work...

Rawcopy is a straightforward DOS utility designed around copying data, with the sort of focused functionality that was common among command-line tools of the period. Rather than at...

Grand Monster Slam takes tennis, removes anything resembling normal human athletes, and replaces them with creatures that look like they escaped a fever dream. In Grand Monster Sla...

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...

The 1989 Scrabble release feels a bit like playing the board game on an old typewriter. It’s clunky, monochrome, and oddly charming. The computer AI is less of a challenge an...

MechWarrior (1989) was one of the first games to put players inside a 3D cockpit of a giant mech, but it wasn’t just a combat game, it was also an open-ended mercenary RPG, w...

Super Speed is a straightforward racing game built around one very important concept: going fast. Players take control of racing cars, compete on circuits, and attempt to finish ah...

Earthrise taps into late Cold War anxieties, presenting a future shaped by political tension and hard choices. Part strategy, part simulation, it tasks you with managing global sys...