abandonware games sorted by popularity

Command & Conquer: Red Alert is a real-time strategy (RTS) video game developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Interactive in 1996. It is part of the Command &...

Premier Manager 2 polished the formula, giving football nerds even more stats to obsess over. If you thought juggling line-ups and balancing books was fun in the first game, this s...

Released in 1988, Alien Fires 2199 AD looks and plays like someone tried to translate a fever dream into a sci-fi RPG. You control some dude with a chin of steel and a crew that se...

Nuclear War is an abandoned turn-based strategy game designed by Eric Hyman and Jon Van Caneghem. Nuclear War was developed and released by New World Computing in 1989 for Amiga an...

Gods is a video game developed by The Bitmap Brothers and initially released in 1991. It is a platformer that combines action and puzzle-solving elements. The game was originally r...

Saddle up, pardner. Billy The Kid puts you in the dusty boots of the infamous outlaw himself. This is the Wild West, DOS-style — pixel pistols, wanted posters, and dialogue t...

Few games deserve the title of “classic” more than Day of the Tentacle (1993). It’s Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman at their weirdest, giving us time travel, mutant...

There’s something oddly admirable about a game that hands you a polyester-clad disaster like Larry and says, “Go on, make him succeed.” Leisure Suit Larry 1: In t...

The Colonel's Bequest is a graphic adventure game developed and published by Sierra On-Line. It was released in 1989 for various platforms, including MS-DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST. T...

Monkey Island 2 is the second game of the Monkey Island series, a point and click adventure game set in a world of pirates and mysterious treasures. Monkey Island 2 utilizes a comm...

Released in 1991, Free D.C.! is one of those games that feels like a time capsule of early PC experimentation. It mixes political satire with arcade-style action, letting you fight...

Welcome to the future, where space empires are managed entirely via text and colored dots. Anacreon puts you in charge of an interstellar civilization and lets you conquer galaxies...

_Jill of the Jungle 2: Jill Goes Underground_ expands on the successful formula established by its predecessor. Released in 1992, it sends Jill into subterranean environments packe...

Released in 1993, Seven Cities of Gold (Commemorative Edition) invited players to explore the New World with a mixture of discovery, strategy and occasional greed. Sailing into unk...

Explosions? Check. Missiles? Check. Graphics that look like someone spilled gray soup on your monitor? Double check. A-10 Tank Killer lets you pilot a flying war machine and rain c...

Karateka combines cinematic storytelling with martial arts action in a way that was remarkably ambitious for its time. Players guide a lone warrior through a fortress filled with g...

One of the best licensed games of the '90s, Blade Runner (1997) puts you in the rain-soaked shoes of Ray McCoy, a detective tracking down replicants in a world where it's always ni...

Released in 1998 for Windows XP-era PCs, Fatal Relations is an interactive drama that leans heavily into adult themes, intrigue, and morally questionable choices. More visual novel...

Released in 1996 for DOS, this beast is not a new game so much as an ultra-hard remix of Doom II, crafted by level designers who apparently thought “too much ammo” was ...

Yes, Astrotit (1987) is really the name, and no, it’s not what you think — though it does feel like it was named by a bored teenager. This side-scrolling shooter puts y...

Hacker 2: The Doomsday Papers doubles down on everything the original attempted, raising the stakes from “interesting breach of security” to “global catastrophe.&...

Moonbase (1990) isn’t about blasting aliens or dodging meteors—it’s about survival, planning, and resource management. You’re tasked with building a functio...

Before rhythm games took over, there was Moonwalker (1989), where you play as none other than Michael Jackson himself, saving kidnapped kids by dancing enemies into submission. Yes...

Forget Sonic. Forget Mario. Zool is a ninja from the Nth Dimension, which is apparently a place where hyperactive insects fight sentient sweets. Speed is the name of the game, and ...