abandonware games sorted by popularity

Warcraft: Orcs and Humans is where Blizzard’s legendary fantasy saga began. This real-time strategy classic pits humans against orcs in a battle for control of a war-torn wor...

Before Pixar made you cry with a lamp and a toy cowboy, there was 3D Studio 3 on DOS. Released in 1993, this was the go-to tool for aspiring animators who didn’t mind waiting...

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...

Life & Death is a medical simulation game developed by Software Toolworks and released in 1988 for MS-DOS computers. It aimed to provide players with a realistic simulation of ...

Rome wasn’t built in a day—but you’ll conquer it in one afternoon. Centurion (1990) lets you play as a Roman commander with delusions of grandeur and a thing for ...

Ecstatica is a haunting anomaly in the DOS library, blending early 3D visuals with a dark fairy-tale atmosphere. Its polygonal characters may look crude by modern standards, but th...

Lotus: The Ultimate Challenge (1993, DOS) is the kind of racing game that makes you feel like you should be wearing aviators and blasting synthwave. It’s pure, high-speed sim...

Now with 27% more diplomacy and 300% more frustration! Axis and Allies: Iron Blitz (1999) takes everything from the original game and throws in extra scenarios, improved AI, and mo...

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...

Step into the polygonal shoes of Edward Carnby (or Emily Hartwood, if you're feeling bold) in Alone in the Dark, the grandfather of survival horror games. Released in 1992 for DOS,...

After the success of Ultima 6: The False Prophet, Origin decided to "create worlds" not part of the popular Ultima series (strictly speaking) using the same engine of Ultima 6. The...

Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? is an educational computer game and television game show franchise created by Broderbund. It focuses on teaching geography and history while playe...

In 1996, Diablo descended onto PCs and basically defined the “click until everything dies” genre. The gothic town of Tristram sits atop a dungeon stuffed with demons, l...

In The Lost Vikings (1993, DOS), three Viking warriors with more brawn than brains find themselves kidnapped by aliens. Instead of raiding villages, they’re solving puzzles w...

Gruntz looks cute at first glance, like a game that might politely ask you to solve a few puzzles and then let you relax. It is lying. In Gruntz, you control small clay creatures t...

SimCity 3000 is a city-building simulation game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. It was released in 1999 as the third major installment in the SimCity series, f...

If Oil Barons is Monopoly with attitude, Oil Imperium is its slightly more serious cousin who read a business textbook once and won’t let you forget it. Released in 1989, thi...

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-...

Doh is back, and he’s mad - presumably because no one understood what he was in the first place. Arkanoid 2 takes the original formula and dials everything up: more levels, m...

When in Gaul, punch like the Gauls do. In Asterix and Obelix (1996), you control the iconic French duo on a globetrotting beat-‘em-up adventure that mostly involves sending R...

When Fallout landed in 1997, it didn’t just introduce a new RPG, it redefined what post-apocalyptic storytelling could feel like. Set in a retro-futuristic wasteland dripping...

Hercules brings mythological heroism into the late 90s with the kind of enthusiasm that only that era could produce. It mixes action and platforming in a way that occasionally feel...

Welcome to Alter Ego: Male Version, where your life begins with a cry and a diaper and only goes downhill - or uphill, depending on your choices. This text-based simulation lets yo...

Angel 3 is that kind of DOS game where you sit down thinking "I'll give it five minutes" and three hours later you're still trying to figure out what just happened. Released in 199...

The Miami Vice game developed by Capstone Software and released in 1989 for MS-DOS was an action-strategy game based on the popular TV show. Unlike other arcade-style adaptations, ...