abandonware games sorted by popularity

Saddle up for an awkward mix of minigames that vaguely resemble rodeo events. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show tries to recreate the excitement of a 19th-century traveling circus but ...

Colosso Secret (1997, DOS) is the moody prequel/sequel/parallel universe to Colosso Revenge, where secrets abound and subtlety is tossed out the window. Imagine Indiana Jones in a ...

What happens when a basketball game forgets about realism and goes full cartoon? Basket Master (1990), that’s what. This Spanish-developed DOS gem pits two oddly animated bal...

Before rhythm games took over, there was Moonwalker (1989), where you play as none other than Michael Jackson himself, saving kidnapped kids by dancing enemies into submission. Yes...

Knights of the Sky (1990, DOS) throws you into the cockpit of a biplane during WWI, where every dogfight is a dance of death and machine oil. With dynamic campaigns and customizabl...

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...

Striker 95 takes the football formula into the middle of the 1990s, with more detailed presentation and a stronger emphasis on competitive matches. The game offers the usual ingred...

Satan is a 1989 DOS action game with a dark fantasy setting, placing players in a world filled with monsters, dangerous environments, and supernatural threats. The player takes con...

Borland Turbo Pascal 1.0 was the first release of one of the most influential programming environments of the 1980s. It brought Pascal development to DOS in a package that was rema...

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...

Before WWII games flooded the market, Knights of the Desert (1983, DOS) was already reenacting the North African campaign in pixels. You command Rommel’s Afrika Korps—o...

ResidualVM is an open-source game engine project created to run certain classic adventure games on modern computers by replacing their original executable code with a compatible en...

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...

Thexder 2: Firehawk expands the original transforming-robot formula with larger environments, new enemies and a greater emphasis on combat. The basic trick remains wonderfully simp...

Visions of the Aftermath: The Boomtown presents a bleak vision of survival in a world that has already suffered the unpleasant consequences of civilization going spectacularly wron...

Starcross is a 1982 science-fiction text adventure from Infocom that places the player aboard a mysterious spacecraft with an intriguing and potentially dangerous problem to solve....

Released in 1990, LineWars delivers straightforward strategic action where players command futuristic forces across minimalist battlefields. Despite its simple presentation, the ga...

If you’ve ever wondered what professional wrestling would look like if it were coded on a calculator from the 1980s, Tag Team Wrestling has your answer. Two beefy sprites&mda...

Before AI could annihilate grandmasters, Psion Chess was already humbling humans back in 1985. Available for DOS and Macintosh, this game wasn’t flashy, but it didn’t n...

Warp Rogue is a later revival of classic roguelike ideas, mixing turn-based exploration with procedural danger and a healthy disregard for the survival prospects of the player. Rel...

Star Fleet 1: The War Begins is a 1985 space strategy game inspired by classic television science fiction, putting players in command of a starship during a large-scale conflict. R...

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...

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 ...

Antix (1985) is Snake, but with a death wish. Created by the same mad genius behind Tetris, this game takes the familiar snake-trail mechanic and cranks it to eleven. You’ve ...

Flame Dragon Plus: Marks of Wind is a Japanese-style role-playing game with a strong emphasis on fantasy adventure, character development, exploration, and tactical battles. Player...

If Star Trek Combat Arena had a motto, it would be “talk diplomacy later.” Released in 1989 for DOS, this game tossed Starfleet’s peaceful ideals right out the ai...

Profezia is a 1991 DOS adventure game that combines fantasy themes, exploration, and puzzle-solving into a mysterious journey. Players enter a world filled with secrets, strange ch...

Independence War takes space combat seriously, almost stubbornly so. Instead of arcade-style dogfights, it presents a Newtonian flight model where momentum, inertia, and positionin...

Modem Wars is an early strategy game that feels almost prophetic today, especially because it was designed around competitive play long before online gaming became commonplace. Pla...

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...