abandonware games sorted by popularity

If you’ve ever wanted to command a basketball team without having to actually dribble or break a sweat, Omni Play Basketball (1990, DOS) has your number. The game lets you ma...

Hollywood Pictures turns the movie industry into a game of creativity, planning, and business decisions. Players take on the role of a studio executive, dealing with productions, s...

Italicized title: J.R.R. Tolkien's Riders of Rohan. Rather than focusing on epic battles alone, this adaptation places players in the role of a member of Rohan during one of the mo...

There’s something charmingly ruthless about TV Mogul, a game that hands you a television network and basically says, “Don’t mess it up.” Released in 1988, it throws you int...

Nanotank is a 1993 Windows 3.x strategy game that takes the concept of armored warfare and shrinks it down to a delightfully miniature scale. Instead of commanding enormous armies ...

Twilight 2000 drops you into a grim alternate future where global conflict has gone spectacularly wrong, and survival is less about heroics and more about scraping by. Released in ...

Wizball is a wonderfully strange arcade game built around a simple but unusual mission: restore color to a world that has apparently decided that monochrome is fashionable. You con...

Mission Critical delivers a tense science fiction adventure centered on survival, exploration, and a desperate struggle aboard a damaged spacecraft. Players must investigate their ...

PC Paintbrush is an early computer painting program that helped make graphical drawing accessible on IBM-compatible PCs. Released in 1984, it arrived when using a computer to creat...

In the Dead of Night is one of those mid-90s DOS oddities that feels like it crawled straight out of a programmer’s personal nightmares. Part adventure, part horror, and part...

Holiday World Tycoon is the sort of game that feels like it was designed after someone spent a bit too long staring at a postcard rack in an airport gift shop and thought, &ld...

In Sito Pons 500cc Grand Prix, you’re tossed straight onto the track with the grace of a rookie who definitely didn’t read the manual. The game tries hard to recreate t...

John Madden Football was the first of a series of american football sports games sponsored by the coach of the same name. The first John Madden Football is an abandoned game develo...

Objection! is a 1992 DOS game built around the dramatic world of courtroom arguments, legal reasoning, and the thrilling possibility that one badly chosen sentence can ruin your en...

Released in 1989 for DOS, Poker Relay (also known as 9 Poker) is less a glamorous casino sim and more a smoky backroom full of pixelated cards and questionable programming. You get...

Superman: The Man of Steel is an action game built around one of the most difficult tasks in gaming: making Superman feel appropriately powerful without making the entire game comp...

Einstein Writer 7 is a word-processing application from the mid-1980s, built for users who wanted to move beyond the typewriter without necessarily buying a huge office computer. I...

Faces Tris 3 (1990) takes a familiar concept and gives it a slightly unsettling twist. Yes, it’s a falling-blocks puzzle game, but instead of abstract shapes, you’re st...

MDDClone is a modern retro-style project that deliberately looks back toward the golden age of classic computer games. Rather than chasing photorealistic graphics or enormous open ...

Forget modern physics—Caverns of Kroz lets you destroy walls with whips. Yes, whips. This 1989 ASCII masterpiece from Apogee is part puzzle, part action, and all danger. You ...

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 ...

Star Wars: Rebel Assault is a 1993 interactive action game designed to recreate the cinematic excitement of the original trilogy through pre-rendered sequences, scripted missions, ...

The Three Musketeers turns Alexandre Dumas's famous swashbuckling world into a computer adventure filled with swords, intrigue and opportunities to behave like a heroic Frenchman w...

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...

You don’t need a joystick the size of a tree to enjoy Konami’s Ping Pong (1996, DOS). Simple, fast, and maddeningly addictive, this digital table tennis game nails the ...

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,...

Might and Magic: World of Xeen is what happens when two already massive RPGs decide to shake hands and merge into one enormous adventure. By combining Clouds of Xeen and Darkside o...

D-Zone is what you’d get if someone blended city-building with military strategy and sprinkled in a dash of chaos. You’re tasked with running a base while fending off a...

Phantis is a 1987 platform action game that sends players through colorful environments filled with enemies, obstacles, and classic challenges requiring quick reflexes. The game fo...

Icewind Dale arrived in 2000 as a frosty sibling to the Baldur's Gate formula, trading political intrigue for glorious dungeon crawling in the forgotten corners of the Forgotten Re...