abandonware games sorted by release date

Pac-girl is a 1982 arcade-style maze game that offers another charming variation on one of gaming's most recognizable ideas. The objective is immediately familiar: collect every do...

Paratrooper is a 1982 action game that demonstrates how much excitement can emerge from a single defensive position and an endless stream of incoming enemies. Players control an an...

PC-Man is a 1982 DOS adaptation inspired by the famous maze-chasing arcade formula, bringing the familiar concept of collecting items while avoiding enemies to early personal compu...

Snack Attack 2 is a 1982 DOS arcade-style game built around a simple but immediately understandable premise: collect food while dealing with hazards and enemies that would rather m...

Starcross is a 1982 science-fiction text adventure from Infocom that places the player aboard a mysterious spacecraft with an intriguing and potentially dangerous problem to solve....

Super Pac-Man takes the familiar yellow arcade hero and gives him a slightly more complicated playground than the original maze. Instead of simply eating dots while avoiding ghosts...

The Battle of the Bulge: Tigers in the Snow is a detailed World War II strategy game focused on the German offensive in the Ardennes during the winter of 1944. Released in 1982, it...

The Tomb of Drewan is an early adventure that sends the player into an ancient tomb packed with mystery, danger, and the sort of puzzles that make you question why anyone thought e...

Video Trek 88 is an early computer interpretation of the classic Star Trek-inspired space strategy formula, built around navigating space, locating enemies, managing resources, and...

Volkswriter 3 is a classic DOS word processor from an era when replacing a typewriter with a computer was still a genuinely transformative idea. It provides the basic tools needed ...

Wizardry 2: The Knight of Diamonds takes the classic dungeon crawl and adds a few extra twists, like more mazes to get lost in and puzzles designed to make you question your life c...

Zork is one of the most popular text-adventures and one of the first interactive fiction games ever created. The first Zork was developed in the seventies and ported on various pla...

3-Demon from 1983 is basically Pac-Man with a taste for LSD. You’re in a first-person maze, munching dots while glowing ghosts try to ruin your day. It’s surprisingly c...

Ah yes, Air Trax from 1983 - a game where “flight” is more of a philosophical concept. It’s clunky, it's slow, and it looks like it was coded in someone’s g...

Don’t be fooled by the name—Amazing Maze is more of a slightly-better-than-average maze. But hey, in 1983, navigating a screen full of walls and hoping you guessed righ...

Released in 1983, Battle for Normandy plays less like a game and more like a history book that came alive, donned a helmet, and asked for a coffee. This is wargaming at its purest:...

Released in 1983, this is your grandpa’s Battleship—minus the plastic pegs, but with all the tension of blind naval warfare. There are no fancy graphics, no Hollywood e...

In 1983, Battlezone asked: what if vector graphics could give you war-induced vertigo? You’re in a tank, in a wireframe world, fighting other tanks. That’s it. But it&r...

Beneath Apple Manor is a pioneering game in the roguelike genre, originally developed and released in 1978 by Don Worth for the Apple II and later re-released for DOS as a "Special...

In Bert and the Snake, you are Bert. And yes, there's a snake. That’s the plot. It’s a maze game from a time when naming conventions were refreshingly honest and graphi...

Black Friday (1983) isn’t about shopping mayhem—though you might wish it were after trying to figure out what’s going on. This early DOS title is part stock marke...

Borland Turbo Pascal 1.0 was the first release of one of the most influential programming environments of the 1980s. It brought Pascal development to DOS in a package that was rema...

Borland Turbo Pascal 2.0 continued the remarkably successful formula established by the original Turbo Pascal, providing DOS programmers with a fast compiler and integrated program...

Before BurgerTime stole the fast-food spotlight, there was Burger Blaster—a game where you build burgers by shooting them. With a gun. Because why not? This early arcade-styl...

Step into feudal Japan with Bushido, a game that tries to simulate samurai life on a machine barely capable of rendering a convincing circle. Still, there’s something charmin...

ASCII art has never been so morbid. Classic Hangman is exactly what it says on the tin: guess the word or watch your little stick figure meet a tragic end. Letters become lifelines...

Released in 1983, this classic arcade-style shooter has you defending humanoids from alien abductions. Fly your ship across a scrolling landscape, blasting enemies and saving innoc...

Dig Dug is a classic maze arcade action game that was first released by Namco in 1982 as a coin-op and later for a number of other systems. The gameplay of Dig Dug involves digging...

Often mistaken as a Dig Dug clone, Digger is more like its eccentric cousin who insists on bringing a disco soundtrack to every family gathering. Released in 1983 for DOS, it combi...

Donkey Kong is a landmark video game franchise created by Shigeru Miyamoto and first released by Nintendo in 1981. The original arcade game introduced players to a narrative where ...