abandonware games sorted by popularity

Elevator is one of those early arcade-style games that sounds boring on paper and becomes oddly stressful in practice. You’re navigating elevators, rescuing people, and avoid...

Profezia is an adventure video game developed by the Italian company Trecision and released in 1991. It was available on both the Amiga and MS-DOS platforms. The game is notable fo...

Iron Lord (1990, DOS) is the medieval fantasy game that tried to be everything at once—and somehow pulled it off. It’s part RPG, part action, part strategy, and part &l...

Ishido (1990, DOS/Mac) is the digital version of sitting in a Zen garden and realizing you’re terrible at strategy. The game’s premise is simple: place stones on a grid...

Inspired by the film, The Rocketeer (1991, DOS) lets you strap on a jetpack and soar—well, mostly hover—through an adventure packed with gangsters, Nazis, and mid-centu...

Dylan Dog: Through the Looking Glass takes the surrealism of the comics and dives headfirst into nightmare territory. Imagine Carroll’s Wonderland rewritten by Lovecraft and ...

Lancelot (1988) is an action-adventure that draws loosely from Arthurian legend and very tightly from the difficulty school of “good luck.” You guide the famous knight ...

Infiltrator 2 basically asks: “What if we took everything from the first game and doubled down?” The result is a sequel that’s larger, louder, and just as gleeful...

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...

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...

Released in 1990, Dawn Raider is one of those obscure DOS shooters that probably spent more time in floppy disk boxes than in actual computers. It’s a vertical shoot-’e...

The sequel to Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch, Return to Ringworld throws you back into Larry Niven’s vast sci-fi universe—except this time, the puzzles are tougher...