abandonware games sorted by popularity

Don’t let the cartoony name fool you: Skullduggery: Adventures in Horror wants to unsettle you, and it’s surprisingly good at it. This early horror adventure mixes clas...

Deadly Racer is basically what happens when someone at the office said, “What if racing, but everyone might die?” Released in 1994 for DOS, it’s a fast-paced, rou...

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...

Dungeon Explorer takes the term “dungeon” very seriously—there’s a lot of it, and not much else. Released in 1990, this top-down adventure is part RPG, part...

Based on Anne McCaffrey’s novels, Dragonriders of Pern (1987) is an odd duck. It tries to blend diplomacy, strategy, and a dash of action into one package. You don’t ju...

By 1993, Dragon Force - Day 3 landed as an obscure tactical experiment on DOS. Despite the name, it’s not about a power metal band’s rehearsal schedule but rather a day...

Before management sims became a genre unto themselves, RAPCON tried its hand at turning air-traffic control into entertainment. Surprisingly, it works—if you enjoy stress. Yo...

Released in 2000, Extreme Shopper is one of those games that sounds like a joke—until you realize it fully commits to the premise. You play as a shopper navigating a chaotic ...

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...

Udoiana Raunes is one of those late-DOS curiosities that feels like it escaped from a developer’s hard drive by accident. It presents itself as a fantasy adventure, but quick...

This game is either a delightful brain teaser or a slow descent into madness, depending on how patient you are. 15x15 Picture Puzzle gives you a scrambled mess of tiny square tiles...