abandonware games sorted by popularity

On The Ball is a soccer management game that puts the player on the touchline rather than directly on the pitch. Success depends on decisions involving tactics, lineups, transfers,...

Rally Championships is a 1994 DOS racing game focused on rally-style competition, where speed alone is not enough to guarantee success. Players must deal with winding tracks, chang...

Cyrus is a chess program that doesn’t just play well—it plays with personality. The AI adjusts to your skill level, offering a challenge whether you’re a beginner...

S.D.I. is a 1989 DOS strategy and action game inspired by the Strategic Defense Initiative, the ambitious Cold War plan better known as “Star Wars.” Players take responsibility...

Subwar 2050 takes submarine warfare into a futuristic setting, replacing conventional naval combat with sleek vessels, hostile waters, and enough advanced technology to make a peri...

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...

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...

Aurora Dibularos is an unusual game with an equally unusual title, presenting a science-fiction setting through a mixture of exploration, action and puzzle-solving. Its world has t...

Toyota Celica GT Rally puts the player behind the wheel of Toyota's famous rally machine and focuses on the rougher, dirtier side of motorsport. Instead of smooth circuits and pred...

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...

Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe Edition revisits the classic American geography chase with an expanded presentation and the same wonderfully simple premise: find Carmen...

Visual Basic 3 (VB3) is a programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) released by Microsoft in 1993. It is part of the Visual Basic (VB) series, which is know...

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...

Melody Maker 3 is a music creation package that brings composition and experimentation to the DOS environment. Long before modern digital audio workstations turned music production...

Slicks 'n' Slide is a 1993 DOS racing game that keeps things deliberately simple: choose a vehicle, get onto the track, and try to finish ahead of everyone else. The game's top-dow...

Push-Push Penguin is an expanded version of the classic Sega's 1982 arcade game Pengo, incorporating features like power-ups, a combo system, and a more diverse array of enemies, b...

Lynx is a text-based web browser that became famous for doing something that sounds almost impossible to younger computer users: browsing the World Wide Web without displaying pict...

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...

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 ...

Tracon: Air Traffic Control Simulator takes an everyday job and turns it into a surprisingly tense computer simulation. You sit in front of a radar display and become responsible f...

Sports games from the late 1980s often relied on imagination as much as graphics, and Magic Johnson's Basketball is no exception. Featuring the NBA legend himself, it delivers fast...

Part interactive thriller, part newsroom simulator, The President is Missing (1988, DOS) casts you as an investigative journalist trying to unravel a political conspiracy before ev...

Back in 1989, David Wolf: Secret Agent tried really hard to make you feel like James Bond. You get car chases, fistfights, and enough cheesy dialogue to fill an action movie marath...

Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation is an obscure fantasy adventure built around exploration, combat, and the hunt for magical objects. The setting has all the ingredients you might exp...

Guns 'R' Us feels like someone looked at the early ’90s and decided subtlety was overrated. This side-scrolling shooter piles on enemies, explosions, and weapon upgrades with...

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...

Oil's Well is an action-puzzle game released by Sierra On-Line in 1983/84. It was originally made for platforms like the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and MS-DOS, but was la...

Luigi and Spaghetti (1992, DOS) sounds like a dinner order but is actually an educational puzzle adventure. You guide a tiny robot named Luigi (no, not that one) through logic puzz...

Microsoft Multiplan 4.2 is a spreadsheet application from the years when electronic spreadsheets were still something of a revelation. Multiplan lets users organize figures into ro...

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...