abandonware games sorted by popularity

Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned brings Gabriel Knight back for another wonderfully peculiar supernatural investigation, this time taking him to the Frenc...

Arcade Pool (1994) is like playing a game of billiards in your best friend’s basement—if your best friend happened to be a DOS machine with a serious competitive streak...

Orbiter is a 1986 space simulation that gives players the opportunity to experience the challenges of operating a spacecraft in orbit. The game focuses on navigation, maneuvering, ...

Renegade Legion Interceptor is a 1990 DOS space combat simulation set in the futuristic Renegade Legion universe. Players pilot an advanced spacecraft through dangerous missions, m...

In Colosso Revenge (1997, DOS), a giant angry head (presumably Colosso) is back, and it’s not in a forgiving mood. Expect side-scrolling mayhem with explosions, mutant monstr...

Released in 1990, Joe Montana Football attempts to capture the excitement of American football while making the sport accessible to computer players. Featuring the legendary quarte...

Don’t let the title fool you — Blitz Draughts isn’t a military simulation but rather a gloriously intense checkers game from 1992. This DOS brain-bender turns the...

Rocket Ranger is a 1988 DOS action-strategy game from Cinemaware that mixes science fiction, arcade sequences, and an alternate-history version of World War II. Players take on the...

Released in 1988, Journey to the Center of the Earth draws inspiration from Jules Verne's famous novel and invites players into a subterranean world filled with mysteries and dange...

Bill Elliott's NASCAR Challenge brings stock-car racing to the computer with a focus on speed, car setup and the unforgiving business of keeping a powerful machine on the track. Pl...

Aurora Dibularos is an unusual game with an equally unusual title, presenting a science-fiction setting through a mixture of exploration, action and puzzle-solving. Its world has t...

FreeDOS Shell provides a command-line environment for FreeDOS, bringing the classic DOS experience to a later generation of computers. Its purpose is wonderfully straightforward: g...

Austerlitz recreates one of Napoleon's most famous victories as a historical strategy game, putting the player in the middle of the Battle of Austerlitz. The focus is firmly on bat...

Empire Soccer 94 is football stripped of glamour and presented with a straight face that makes everything unintentionally funny. There are no licenses, no famous players, and no at...

Atic Atac remake revisits the classic Spectrum-era action adventure with updated presentation while retaining the basic spirit of exploration, combat and treasure hunting. The orig...

Released in 1991, Lone Wolf: The Mirror of Death brings Joe Dever's beloved fantasy universe to the computer in an adventure that blends role-playing, exploration, and strategic de...

Turbo Gomoku takes the ancient Japanese board game Gomoku and gives it a suitably computerised makeover. The rules are wonderfully simple: players place stones on a grid and attemp...

Master Ninja: Shadow Warrior of Death is a martial-arts action game that embraces the classic fantasy of becoming an unstoppable ninja warrior. The premise is refreshingly uncompli...

Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego? sends players across the continent in pursuit of Carmen and her increasingly slippery gang of thieves. The basic formula is wonderfully effectiv...

Tennis Cup 2 refines its predecessor with smoother controls and a broader range of shots, making rallies feel more dynamic and less predictable. Matches demand attention and strate...

A detective adventure inspired by Agatha Christie’s collaborative story, The Scoop (1989, DOS) turns you into a newspaper reporter poking around a suspicious death with nothi...

Hugo 3: Jungle of Doom shifts the setting to a more exotic environment, adding variety to the familiar formula. Released in 1992, it introduces new challenges, new puzzles, and a s...

Super Pinball by Russco is a straightforward computer pinball game that attempts to recreate the noisy, chaotic pleasure of a real machine without requiring a pocket full of coins....

Ah, Championship Manager 93, the game that taught us yelling at pixels is a valid emotional outlet. It's you, a keyboard, and a list of players with stamina ratings. No fancy graph...

Few titles announce their intentions as clearly as Fire Power. This is top-down tank warfare with all the subtle grace of a marching band in a library. You roll into battle, shells...

Dungeons & Dragons meets Disney on a sugar rush. Tangled Tales is a bright, humorous RPG that cheerfully pokes fun at fantasy clichés while still serving a solid adventu...

Part interactive thriller, part newsroom simulator, The President is Missing (1988, DOS) casts you as an investigative journalist trying to unravel a political conspiracy before ev...

Acheton (1987, DOS) is one of those text adventures where the game cheerfully tries to kill you every five minutes — and does so with words. You're tossed into a sprawling, b...

Bank Streek Writer Plus is a word processor from the DOS era, when writing on a computer still felt like a fairly sophisticated trick. Applications such as this one were expected t...

Aliants: The Desperate Battle For Earth! is a science-fiction strategy game built around the suitably alarming idea that humanity has run out of time and extraterrestrial enemies a...