abandonware games sorted by popularity

If you’ve ever wondered what baseball would look like if someone crammed the entire sport into a DOS machine and sprinkled a bit of 90s attitude on top, Epic Baseball has you...

Final Frontier is a late-80s slice of space ambition, the kind that assumes you’re perfectly happy staring at menus while imagining epic interstellar conquest. It’s str...

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...

Released in 1984, Zyll is what happens when a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master learns to code and decides to build a text adventure inside a coffee machine. There are no graph...

Roll up, roll up! Circus Attractions turns your PC into a low-resolution big top full of minigames, each one zanier than the last. Think clown juggling, lion taming, and tightrope ...

Despite the ominous title, Caverns of Chaos (1992) plays like the lovechild of rogue-like masochism and old-school dungeon crawling. There’s loot, traps, monsters, and more w...

Arx Fatalis is basically what happens when someone takes “dungeons and dragons” way too literally. You start trapped in a gloomy underground world because—oops&md...

Masterblazer (1991) is one of those games that feels like it escaped from a late-night coding session fueled by coffee, crisps, and questionable design decisions — and someho...

If you’ve ever wanted to command armies older than your great-great-great-grandparents, Encyclopedia of War: Ancient Battles is your time machine with a keyboard. Released in...

La Grande Armée (1991) returns to Napoleonic warfare, but with a sharper focus on military tactics than imperial administration. This strategy game puts you in charge of mas...

Cougar Force feels like the ’80s exploded into a side-scrolling action game. Big guns, big hair, and bigger explosions define this run-and-gun romp where subtlety is for othe...

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...

ELIZA, created in the mid-1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, was one of the first computer programs to simulate human conversation. Designed as a natural language processing demons...

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...

Gateway to the Savage Frontier is a Dungeons & Dragons computer role-playing game released in 1991. It was developed by Beyond Software (later known as Stormfront Studios) and ...

In Nomad, you’re a space pilot with a ship full of bad decisions and a galaxy’s worth of trouble. The game throws you into a vast star map to explore, trade, and occasi...

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...

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...