abandonware games sorted by popularity

The original Crusader: No Remorse sets the tone for the series: brutal, explosive, and unapologetically action-focused. You’re a rogue operative taking on a dystopian corpora...

Shannara (1995, DOS) adapts the beloved fantasy world into a point-and-click adventure steeped in prophecy, magic, and earnest heroism. Drawing from the novels by Terry Brooks, it ...

The Lost Patrol (1991, DOS) drops you into the brutal jungles of Vietnam, where survival depends on strategy, luck, and maybe divine intervention. You lead a squad of exhausted sol...

If you've ever wanted to pop bubbles while being taunted by adorable dinosaurs, Bust-A-Move Again (1996, DOS) is your jam. It’s like Tetris met a bubble tea menu and had a hy...

Floppy Frenzy embraces early-80s arcade spirit with gleeful abandon. The concept is simple, the pace relentless, and the margin for error thinner than a five-and-a-quarter disk. Yo...

Dragonflight (1991) was a German RPG that dared to think big—party-based adventuring, sprawling maps, and a proper fantasy plot. It played like a love letter to Ultima with i...

Moraff's World offers a colorful fantasy role-playing adventure where players explore a large world, battle monsters, gather treasure, and gradually develop a powerful character. T...

Gulf Strike places you in the cockpit during a very contemporary-for-1986 conflict, blending strategy and simulation with a dash of headline-inspired drama. You manage missions, al...

Space Miner is a 1983 DOS game built around the classic science-fiction fantasy of heading into space and extracting valuable resources. The player pilots a spacecraft through dang...

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...

Clyde is no hero—he's just a guy in a helmet trying to jump through castles and avoid death by... everything. Clyde's Adventure is a charming little platformer that dares to ...

NewsMaster is an early DOS application built around the practical business of managing and producing news-related information. Its existence reflects a period when personal compute...

Troll's Tale is a charming early adventure that combines fairy-tale imagery with simple exploration and puzzle solving. The player takes on the role of a young heroine travelling t...

Star Wars Chess turns the classic game of chess into a surprisingly noisy Star Wars spectacle. Released in 1993, it keeps the familiar rules but replaces the traditional pieces wit...

Ready to get your heart racing with the world’s slowest competitive sport? Bicycle Bridge brings the thrill of bidding, trick-taking, and utter confusion straight to your DOS...

There’s something oddly hypnotic about Gapper, a game that feels like it was assembled during a coffee-fueled night by someone who really liked simple mechanics and didn&rsqu...

Winter Supersports 1992 packages several cold-weather sporting events into a single collection, giving players the chance to compete without actually having to leave a warm room. T...

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...

Fleet Defender places you in the cockpit of a carrier-based fighter and politely suggests you try not to embarrass yourself in front of the entire navy. This flight sim balances ac...

In Kobayashi Naru (1987, DOS), you’re not saving the world—you’re solving it. This sci-fi puzzle adventure drops you in a mysterious facility filled with logic te...

If Shakespeare wrote video games and then decided, “You know what this needs? A parser and some pixelated drama,” you'd get Avon. In this interactive fiction gem from 1...

Netscape Navigator was one of the earliest web browsers that played a crucial role in popularizing the World Wide Web. It was developed by Netscape Communications Corporation and r...

Independence War 2: Edge Of Chaos refines its predecessor’s ideas into a more open-ended and player-driven experience. Trading, piracy, and exploration play a much larger rol...

HTML Tads is a development tool aimed at creating interactive fiction for the web, bringing the wonderfully old-fashioned pleasure of text adventures into a more modern environment...

Uncover It is a puzzle game from 1994 that thrives on curiosity and a bit of patience. The premise is simple: reveal hidden images piece by piece, but the execution keeps you engag...

There’s a certain dark humor baked into Global Thermo War, a game that tackles nuclear conflict with a mix of strategy and unsettling realism. It’s not exactly cheerful...

Sherman M4 is a 1989 DOS tank combat game centered on the famous American M4 Sherman tank. Players take control of the armored vehicle and face battlefield situations where positio...

Moraff's Dungeon of the Unforgiven is a first-person dungeon crawler filled with monsters, exploration, treasure, and the sort of dark corridors that strongly suggest turning aroun...

Waterloo (1989, DOS) is not here to entertain you with flashy graphics or arcade thrills. Instead, it calmly places Napoleon and Wellington on the table and expects you to think. A...

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...