abandonware games sorted by popularity

With Chess88, you’re entering the elite club of DOS chess nerds who appreciate ASCII art and precision time controls. Compared to its 1981 predecessor, it’s a leap forw...

Elite isn’t just a game; it’s a lifestyle choice. This 1987 DOS version throws you into a vast, uncaring galaxy and says, “Good luck.” There’s trading...

Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Restoration of Erathia is often spoken of with a certain reverence, and it is not hard to see why. Everything comes together with a confidence th...

SimCity (or SimCity Classic) is a popular city building simulation in which you, the mayor of a city, have to build a metropolis from the ground up. You can build police and fire d...

Jones in the Fast Lane is the kind of game that you don't see often these days. It's a mix between a digital board game and a modern day life simulation. The goal of the game is to...

Let’s be honest: Cobra Mission is remembered less for its RPG mechanics and more for its... risqué content. The first “eroge” RPG translated into English, ...

Heart of the Maelstrom brings epic dungeon crawling to dizzying heights, challenging players with sprawling levels, fiendish enemies, and puzzles that seem to require a PhD in pati...

Imagine X-COM but with fewer excuses to blame the developers when you miss a 95% chance shot—because in UFO 2000 (2004), the chaos was entirely player-driven. A free, open-so...

International Ninja Rabbits sounds like a fever dream, and in many ways it plays like one too. Released in 1991, this platformer combines martial arts, oversized vegetables, and he...

DX-Ball 2 is a popular brick-breaking game that was first released in 1998 by Longbow Digital Arts. It serves as a sequel to the original DX-Ball, which was inspired by the classic...

Alpha Waves is what happens when someone programs a 3D platformer using only triangles and pure imagination. You bounce. That’s it. You bounce through abstract levels that lo...

The Blues Brothers 2: Jukebox Adventure is a video game developed by Titus Interactive and released in 1993. It is a sequel to the original The Blues Brothers game, which was based...

Before Worms made artillery games cute, Bang! Bang! let you and a friend lob cartoonish shells at each other using nothing but angles, wind speed, and pure spite. It's a math lesso...

Jagged Alliance 2 is a turn-based tactical role-playing strategy game developed by Sir-Tech and released in 1999 for Windows. It is the sequel to the original Jagged Alliance and h...

Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne is a turn-based strategy game developed by Triumph Studios and published by Gathering of Developers. It was released in 2002 as a sequel to t...

In Space Quest 1: The Sarien Encounter, the galaxy’s least qualified hero, Roger Wilco, begins his long tradition of surviving disasters mostly by accident. Released in 1986,...

NCSA Mosaic was one of the earliest web browsers to appear on the market. It was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illino...

Released in 1991, Eye of the Beholder brought classic dungeon crawling into the digital age with style and confidence. Set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe, it delivers grid-...

Mix one part turn-based strategy, one part fantasy novel, add a dash of dragon, and you get Age of Wonders (1999). This is the game where wizards rule, elves sulk in forests, and y...

Alternate Reality: The City is a role-playing video game developed by Paradise Programming for various platforms including Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, and Commodore 64. It was released ...

The Temple of Apshai Trilogy is a series of classic role-playing games developed by Automated Simulations (later known as Epyx) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These games were ...

From the creators of Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace (1989, DOS) is a gloriously over-the-top animated adventure where timing is everything — literally. You play Ace, a muscle...

A game with a name like Battle Isle 93: The Moon of Chromos clearly means business. Released in 1993, it’s an expansion-slash-standalone with new missions, harder AI, and an ...