abandonware games sorted by popularity

TV Sports Baseball from 1991 tries to bottle the magic of America’s pastime and pour it into your DOS machine, complete with commentary and a surprising amount of personality. Th...

Quarky & Quaysoo's Turbo Science is a 1992 educational game that tries to make science more entertaining by adding colorful characters, experiments, and the sort of playful present...

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...

Austerlitz 1805 is another computer interpretation of the Battle of Austerlitz, concentrating on the strategic and tactical decisions surrounding Napoleon's celebrated victory. The...

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...

Strategy fans with a taste for sci-fi and logistics will find something special in Full Metal Planete. Released in 1990 for DOS and Mac, the game is essentially a futuristic board ...

Aka Starglider 2 with an attitude, Revenge of Defender (or Defender of the Crown’s evil twin in name only) is a 3D space shooter where your main enemy is not the aliens&mdash...

Flash Gordon: Il Rapimento di Dale throws you into a pulpy sci-fi serial where subtlety is left at the airlock. Based on the adventures of the square-jawed space hero, the game lea...

Arnhem is the kind of wargame where you spend more time reading hex maps than shooting anything. It’s all about recreating Operation Market Garden — you know, that WWII...

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...

Tera: La Cité des Crânes is a moody adventure that leans heavily on atmosphere and mystery. The world feels strange and slightly unsettling, with puzzles that require patience an...

The Train Escape to Normandy is a wartime strategy game built around one of history's most dangerous occupations: trying to survive military operations while trains, soldiers and e...

Rayman Forever brings together Rayman's colorful platforming adventure and additional content in a package aimed at giving players a generous helping of Ubisoft's imaginative masco...

QBasic 1.1 is Microsoft's approachable programming environment for DOS and one of the easiest ways an entire generation learned that computers could be told exactly what to do. It ...

Daffy Duck PI: The Case of the Missing Letters is a Looney Tunes spin on the classic edutainment formula. As Daffy, you’re on the trail of a nefarious plot to steal the alpha...

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 1993, Lethal Tender combines platform action with a satirical storyline centered on greed, money, and determined heroes. Players jump through colorful levels while coll...

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...

Super Bubble Mania is a cheerful arcade-style game built around bubbles, movement, quick reactions, and the sort of colorful action that makes it dangerously easy to say, “Just o...

Zona 0 is a top-down action game from Spain that blends cyberpunk aesthetics with frenetic gameplay and a dash of existential dread. You play a cyber-agent navigating a dystopian c...

Loopz, released in 1990, is the kind of puzzle game that looks innocent for about five seconds before it starts humbling you. The concept is simple: connect the pieces, form loops,...

More smoke-filled backrooms than a noir film and enough slot machines to trigger déjà vu—Caesars Palace is your low-res Vegas getaway. You're given a pile of ch...

Wizard's Crown is a classic fantasy role-playing game that gives players a party of adventurers, a dangerous world, and a generous supply of reasons to regret entering the nearest ...

In Core War Plus, programming isn’t just for making spreadsheets—it’s for virtual combat. You write tiny programs that battle for control of computer memory, turn...

You probably didn’t know you needed a game about a rapping, music-spinning dragon, but DJ Puff fills that oddly specific void. Released in 1993 for DOS, this platformer featu...

The Lost Treasures of Infocom is essentially a library of interactive fiction for players willing to trade spectacular graphics for spectacularly active imaginations. The collectio...

WinFrotz is a Windows implementation of Frotz, an interpreter designed to run classic Infocom-style interactive fiction using Z-machine story files. Instead of providing one specif...

Released in 1994, _Jetstrike_ mixes action, strategy, and flight combat into a surprisingly ambitious package. Players take command of military aircraft and tackle missions that in...

Released in 1988, Dracula in London was part strategy, part board game, and all atmosphere. You weren’t just staking vampires; you were managing resources, characters, and ti...

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 ...