abandonware games sorted by popularity

Profezia is an adventure video game developed by the Italian company Trecision and released in 1991. It was available on both the Amiga and MS-DOS platforms. The game is notable fo...

Great Napoleonic Battles is the kind of game that assumes you are ready to command armies and possibly rewrite history before breakfast. In Great Napoleonic Battles, strategy is ev...

Ah, Betrayal—a game with a name that really sets the tone. Is it about backstabbing? Politics? Lost love? Not really. It’s actually a hybrid of strategy and role-playin...

Released in 1994, Lords of the Realm is medieval strategy with a distinctly hands-on attitude. This isn’t just about moving armies; it’s about managing land, people, an...

Moonbase (1990) isn’t about blasting aliens or dodging meteors—it’s about survival, planning, and resource management. You’re tasked with building a functio...

Battlecruiser 3000AD (1996) is less a game and more a test of faith. Ambitious beyond reason, it promised total control of a massive starship—crew management, planetary landi...

Evolution is an early experiment in simulating progress, and it wears its ambition proudly. The game attempts to model development and change over time, often in abstract ways that...

Framed is a puzzle-platformer that treats each screen like a small mechanical riddle. You guide your character through hazards that feel carefully arranged, almost theatrical in th...

Here comes another bubble game—but this one packs a punch. Bubble Trouble is a frantic shoot-’em-up where you pop evil bouncing bubbles before they bounce you out of ex...

Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe Edition is an educational computer game released in 1992 by Broderbund Software. It's part of the popular Carmen Sandiego franchise, des...

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 1990, Dawn Raider is one of those obscure DOS shooters that probably spent more time in floppy disk boxes than in actual computers. It’s a vertical shoot-’e...

Sink or Swim is basically what happens when someone asks, “What if we turned a rescue operation into a slapstick puzzle show?” You guide lifeboat-juggling hero S.S. Dav...

Final Frontier is a late-80s slice of space ambition, the kind that assumes you’re perfectly happy staring at menus while imagining epic interstellar conquest. It’s str...

Post-apocalyptic survival meets real estate management in Burntime, where the world is ruined, but you still need to hire employees and secure water rights. It’s like Mad Max...

International Soccer Challenge in 1990 continues the tradition of digital football with a more competitive edge. The pacing is brisk, the mechanics approachable, and the matches of...

Heroes of the Lance takes the beloved fantasy setting and turns it into a side-scrolling adventure that is as ambitious as it is occasionally frustrating. Controlling a party of he...

Il Grande Gioco di Tangentopoli from 1993 is one of those rare political satire games that feels both hilariously specific and unexpectedly timeless. Built around Italy's corruptio...