abandonware games sorted by popularity

Mech Brigade (1987) is a strategy game that lets you live out your dream of commanding an army of giant robots. Set in a futuristic battlefield, you’re in charge of deploying...

Galleons of Glory invites players to sail the high seas in search of fame, fortune, and possibly a few cannonballs heading directly toward their ship. Naval combat games from this ...

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...

Pyramid Power (1986) is what happens when archaeology meets abstract strategy. You’re not dodging mummies or solving hieroglyph puzzles—instead, you’re stacking t...

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...

Borderworld (1996, DOS) is a sci-fi RPG with big ideas, a tiny budget, and enough ambition to fuel a space shuttle. You’re thrown into a galaxy of politics, smuggling, and st...

StarBlade is a 1990 DOS space shooter built around fast action, enemy waves, and the familiar challenge of keeping a small spacecraft alive against a very large number of things tr...

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...

In 1988, kids with floppy disks instead of smartphones got Designasaurus, a quirky blend of education and prehistoric fantasy. The premise: design your own dinosaur and see if it s...

Citadel of the Black Sun is a fantasy adventure built around exploration, danger, and the ominous business of investigating a mysterious stronghold. The game places the player in a...

Nippon Safes, Inc. is a 1992 adventure game with a distinctly European sense of humor and a story involving criminals, schemes, and people who probably should have chosen more resp...

Hardball 2 is baseball distilled into a form that manages to be both accessible and surprisingly tense. It does not overwhelm you with complexity, but it gives you enough control t...

Postal 2 takes the outrageous premise of its predecessor and expands it into a first-person sandbox where practically every ordinary errand can become an excuse for complete chaos....

World Darts takes the humble pub game of darts and gives it a suitably digital makeover. The objective sounds simple enough: throw little pointed objects at a circular board and tr...

Released in 1988, Dream Zone was a surreal adventure where you explore your own subconscious after being sucked into a dream machine. It’s colorful, strange, and often unsett...

FreeDOS Shell provides a command-line environment for FreeDOS, bringing the classic DOS experience to a later generation of computers. Its purpose is wonderfully straightforward: g...

The wonderfully direct title If It Moves, Shoot It! leaves little room for misunderstanding. Released in 1989, it is a side-scrolling shooter where diplomacy is not among the avail...

Hovertank One is an early first-person combat game that places you inside a futuristic armored vehicle and sends you into hostile environments. The idea is delightfully direct: dri...

If Krazy Ivan (1996, Windows XP) had a motto, it’d be “Blow it up first, ask later.” You pilot a massive mech across post-apocalyptic battlefields, obliterating a...

Boot Camp (1989, DOS) is the game that turns military training into a button-mashing festival of pain. Ever dreamed of surviving basic training without breaking a sweat? This is it...

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 ...

Shamus is a maze action game developed by William Mataga and published by Synapse Software in 1982. The game became popular on various home computer platforms of the early 1980s. I...

Paladin 2 is a fantasy strategy and role-playing game where commanding troops and managing a growing force are just as important as swinging a sword. The player takes control of a ...

Put on your mental trench coat, because Codebreaker is here to make you feel smart—or incredibly foolish. It’s a brain-teasing logic game where you deduce secret number...

Sub Command is a detailed naval simulation that puts you in command of modern submarines and expects considerably more than random button pressing. The game focuses on tactical sub...

Hamburger Hell from 1986 is one of those titles that practically dares you to ask, “What were they thinking?” The premise is gloriously absurd, and the execution doesn&...

Titan is an action-puzzle game built around a small craft navigating increasingly dangerous environments filled with obstacles and enemies. Success depends on movement, timing and ...

Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer 2.0 offers a more serious approach to personal flight simulation, putting the player behind the controls of several aircraft while demanding ...

SSN-21 Seawolf is a 1994 submarine simulation that puts players in command of one of the most advanced fictionalized attack submarines of its era. The game focuses on navigation, s...

With a name like Dink Smallwood, you’d expect something ridiculous—and you’d be right. Released in 1998 for Windows XP, this action RPG follows a pig farmer with ...