abandonware games sorted by rating

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...

In Street Sports Basketball (1987, DOS), forget polished courts and referees—this is basketball played between garages, with trash cans as sidelines and pride on the line. Th...

Tennis Cup offers a surprisingly nuanced take on tennis, with mechanics that go beyond simply hitting the ball back and forth. Timing, positioning, and spin all play a role, giving...

Vegas Gambler brings a collection of casino favourites to the home computer, allowing players to try their luck at cards and other gambling games without having to book a flight to...

Murder in the Atlantic takes the classic locked-room mystery and places it aboard a luxury ocean liner, where a murder turns an elegant voyage into an investigation filled with sus...

Chaos Overlords is a cyberpunk-themed strategy game developed by Stick Man Games and published by New World Computing in 1996. Set in a dystopian future, the game focuses on contro...

CheckIt 3 is a DOS diagnostic utility designed to inspect the health and configuration of a personal computer. In an era when Windows could not necessarily tell you much about what...

Dangerous Dave: Dave Goes Nutz! is what happens when a platformer drinks too much coffee. The pace is frantic, the enemies relentless, and the levels filled with hazards that seem ...

Released in 1990, Dragon Strike dared to combine the wonder of Dungeons & Dragons with the thrill of first-person flight simulation. Yes, instead of piloting jets, you piloted ...

In Escape from Dr. Colosso, you find yourself trapped in the lair of a mad scientist whose idea of interior design seems to be “danger first, safety never.” It’s ...

Heavy Barrel is an action game that embraces chaos with enthusiasm, throwing enemies at you in a way that feels both overwhelming and oddly satisfying. The gameplay is straightforw...

Building upon the original formula, Kingdom of Kroz 2 introduces fresh levels, new challenges, and even more opportunities to question every decision you make. Exploration remains ...

Theatre of War is a strategy game that puts the player in command of military forces while recreating the tension of battlefield decisions. Rather than simply moving units toward t...

Yuppi's Revenge is what happens when ‘80s satire meets office rage. You’re a disgruntled ex-yuppie on a rampage through the corporate world—armed with a golf club...

Arctic Adventure is the sequel nobody asked for to Pharaoh's Tomb, except this time you’re freezing your butt off. As Nevada Smith (not a typo, it’s his real name), you...

Dick Tracy (1990) tries to turn the classic comic-strip detective into a video game, and the result is equal parts charming and clunky. You’ll chase gangsters, dodge bullets,...

Oubliette is a 1983 role-playing game and an important early example of the dungeon-crawling tradition that would influence generations of computer RPGs. Players create characters,...

This 1992 DOS version of Scrabble takes the world’s most civilized word battle and turns it into a duel between man and silicon. The AI opponent doesn’t cheat (much), b...

Telengard is one of the earliest computer role-playing games, released in 1982 for various home computers like the Commodore 64, Apple II, and TRS-80 and later for PC. It was devel...

Trantor: The Last Stormtrooper is a tough little action game that drops you into a ruined city with one very straightforward job: survive. You play as a lone soldier wandering thro...

1994Pool is a straightforward pool simulation that brings the familiar green baize and clatter of billiard balls to the computer screen. The game focuses on the essentials: lining ...

A Dudley Dilemma (1988) sounds like the title of a children’s book, but it’s actually a very British text adventure for DOS where the stakes are politely quirky and mil...

Acrobat Reader was the first of a family of application software developed by Adobe Inc. to view, create, manipulate, print and manage Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Acrobat...

Action Supercross is a fast, stunt-heavy motocross game that puts you on a bike and then seems to ask one very important question: how much airborne stupidity can you survive? Trac...

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...

In Arcade Volleyball (1987), two pixelated figures smack a ball over a net with all the grace of caffeinated stick figures. It's simple, it's bizarre, and it somehow manages to be ...

Ball Race is a compact racing game built around the deceptively simple idea of controlling a rolling ball while trying to stay ahead of the competition. Instead of roaring engines ...

Released in 1992, Barbie for DOS is what happens when someone asks, “What if pink could be a video game?” You play as Barbie on a quest to collect accessories and win K...

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...

Basketball Challenge offers a straightforward computer interpretation of basketball, concentrating on shooting, movement and the challenge of putting more points on the board than ...