abandonware games sorted by popularity

King's Table: The Legend of Ragnarok mixes role-playing, strategy, and a generous helping of Norse mythology into an adventure that rewards careful thinking instead of reckless swo...

Don’t let the elemental title fool you—Fire and Ice is less about epic fantasy and more about precise platforming wrapped in charming visuals. It’s colorful and d...

Lords of Doom, released in 1990, wears its dark fantasy influences proudly and with very little restraint. Everything about the game feels intense, from the name to the atmosphere,...

Isle of the Dead is a first-person horror shooter that combines exploration, combat, and a wonderfully grim island setting. You find yourself surrounded by hostile creatures and my...

Archery (1985) is what happens when someone says, “Hey, what if we made a bow-and-arrow game with the graphical fidelity of a cave painting?” You shoot arrows. That&rsq...

F40 Pursuit Simulator takes a different approach by putting you in the cockpit of a fictional high-tech interceptor designed for one job: catching bad guys. Instead of large-scale ...

Kingdoms of Germany places players in charge of managing territories within medieval Germany, blending historical strategy with political decision-making and military planning. Suc...

Silent Service 2 builds on the submarine simulation formula with a more detailed representation of underwater warfare. Players command a World War II submarine, navigating patrol a...

Tongue of the Fatman is one of those games that seems to have escaped from a particularly strange corner of an arcade designer's imagination. It is a fighting game, but instead of ...

A detective adventure inspired by Agatha Christie’s collaborative story, The Scoop (1989, DOS) turns you into a newspaper reporter poking around a suspicious death with nothi...

Back in 1999, Warzone 2100 felt like a glimpse into the future of strategy gaming. Forget endless waves of faceless soldiers; here you could actually design your own tanks and chop...

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...

When Die Hard 2: Die Harder hit DOS in 1992, it decided the airport setting meant “time for an on-rails shooter.” Picture John McClane glued to a track, blasting bad gu...

Sword Quest 2: Tale of the Talisman continues the fantasy adventures of its predecessor, offering another journey filled with exploration, enemies, treasure, and the sort of ancien...

Volkswriter 3 is a classic DOS word processor from an era when replacing a typewriter with a computer was still a genuinely transformative idea. It provides the basic tools needed ...

In BC's Quest for Tires, you play a loincloth-wearing caveman who’s riding a unicycle through danger, because apparently that’s how courtship worked in 1984. The goal? ...

MicroMan is a wonderfully strange platform adventure that shrinks its hero down to microscopic proportions and sends him into a world where ordinary objects become enormous obstacl...

Rings of Zilfin is a 1987 fantasy role-playing game that offers players a broad world to explore, filled with towns, wilderness, enemies, and mysterious locations. The game combine...

Othello is a 1986 computer adaptation of the classic strategy board game in which two players compete to control the board by surrounding and flipping their opponent’s pieces. Th...

Released in 1990 for DOS, Soviet is a cold war thriller that plays out like an interactive spy novel. You’re an American journalist turned reluctant agent, caught in a tangle...

Star Wars: Rebel Assault is a 1993 interactive action game designed to recreate the cinematic excitement of the original trilogy through pre-rendered sequences, scripted missions, ...

Indenture is a small, relatively obscure DOS adventure that thrives on mood rather than complexity. Set in a bleak, oppressive world, it uses minimalistic visuals and text-driven s...

Joe Blade is a classic arcade-style action game in which the titular hero has apparently decided that one man is sufficient to deal with an entire collection of dangerous criminals...

Motorbike Madness is an arcade-style motorcycle game that puts the player behind the handlebars and wastes very little time explaining the dangers involved. The focus is on speed, ...

Infiltrator 2 basically asks: “What if we took everything from the first game and doubled down?” The result is a sequel that’s larger, louder, and just as gleeful...

Murder Club is a mystery adventure that places players in the middle of a complicated investigation filled with suspects, clues, and enough suspicious behavior to make trusting any...

Dune Generations was a canceled 3D MMO strategy game set in the Dune universe that was never published. Dune Generations was in development by Cryo Interactive ...

Spiritual Warfare is a 1993 action-adventure that replaces the usual fantasy arsenal with something considerably more unusual: biblical themes and religious symbolism. The player t...

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...

Industry Giant 2 turns spreadsheets into entertainment, which sounds impossible until you realize how addictive it becomes. Released in 2002, this business simulation asks players ...