abandonware games sorted by popularity

With a name like Blort!, you'd expect a fart joke or a kids’ cartoon gone wrong, but no—it’s a 1987 arcade-style blaster for DOS. You play as a cosmic defender sh...

Fantastic Dizzy, released in 1994, stars a cheerful egg with an unfortunate talent for getting into trouble. This platform-adventure hybrid mixes exploration, puzzle-solving, and l...

Udoiana Raunes is one of those late-DOS curiosities that feels like it escaped from a developer’s hard drive by accident. It presents itself as a fantasy adventure, but quick...

African Adventure is one of those games that feels like it was made during a two-hour layover at the airport - but somehow, it works. Set in the savannah, it combines survival, exp...

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...

Released in 1983, this is your grandpa’s Battleship—minus the plastic pegs, but with all the tension of blind naval warfare. There are no fancy graphics, no Hollywood e...

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...

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...

In Chicago 90, you either play as the cops or the crooks in a top-down, crime-infested, vaguely Windy City-esque setting. Think of it as a proto-GTA with more sirens and fewer mora...

Come one, come all, to the saddest circus ever pixelated. In Ballyhoo, you're stuck in a depressing carnival trying to solve a kidnapping while dealing with clowns, carnies, and th...

Imagine Tetris went on a sugar binge and had an identity crisis. That’s Zyconix (1992, DOS) in a nutshell. It’s a tile-matching puzzle game where nothing quite behaves ...

Shadoworlds (1993, DOS) blends sci-fi corridors with fantasy ambitions, creating a curious hybrid that feels both familiar and slightly off-kilter. You assemble a squad to tackle m...

As the name suggests, EGA-Roids is a colorful take on the classic Asteroids formula, adapted for the EGA era. You pilot a ship through space, blasting rocks and dodging debris in f...