The best fixed screen 2D games

Sokoban is a classic puzzle game first released in 1982 by Hiroyuki Imabayashi for the NEC PC-8801 in Japan and later ported to a number of platforms, including DOS, as Soko-Ban. T...

The Incredible Toon Machine is a puzzle video game developed by Jeff Tunnell Productions and published by Sierra On-Line in 1994. It serves as the successor to the game Sid & A...

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...

Scorched Earth (1991) was the “mother of all games” long before Doom took the title. Two or more tanks face off on a randomly generated terrain, and your only mission i...

The name Carnage says it all—this top-down racer is less about precision driving and more about smashing into your enemies until they resemble digital roadkill. It’s fa...

Manic Miner is a quintessential platformer game that emerged in the early 1980s, developed by Matthew Smith for the ZX Spectrum. It stands as a hallmark of the 8-bit gaming era, ce...

Solomon’s Key is an arcade puzzle-platformer developed by Tecmo and released in 1986. It gained popularity for its challenging gameplay and was later ported to various home s...

Jetpack is a classic 2D platformer video game developed by Adept Software and released for MS-DOS computers in 1993. Created by Adam Pedersen, it became popular for its addictive g...

It’s Bomberman (1992, DOS), the legendary bomb-dropping game where you play a suspiciously cute guy with an infinite bomb supply and questionable indoor safety habits. You mo...

Gorillas, also known as "Gorillas.bas," is a turn-based artillery game that was included as a sample program with Microsoft QBasic, an IDE and interpreter for a variant of the...

Imagine a game where minesweeper meets viral chaos—Chain Reaction (1996) isn’t quite that, but it is a fast-paced puzzle-action hybrid where things blow up in neat litt...

PC-Man is an abandoned top-down Pac-Man clone in every regard: from the shape of the protagonist, to the cute ghosts. PC-Man was designed by Greg Kuperberg, developed by Orion Soft...

Imagine Marble Madness had a caffeine overdose and fell into a platformer. That’s Bumpy’s Arcade Fantasy. You control a perpetually bouncing ball named Bumpy (creative,...

Antix (1985) is Snake, but with a death wish. Created by the same mad genius behind Tetris, this game takes the familiar snake-trail mechanic and cranks it to eleven. You’ve ...

It’s Pac-Man, except it’s… not. Cap Man is a low-budget clone with just enough charm to avoid immediate deletion. You’ve got the dots, the ghosts, the powe...

In Ack-Ack Attack! (1995, DOS), you operate an anti-aircraft gun and do your best to shoot down waves of enemy planes with what appears to be a potato cannon. The game is loud, fra...

It’s Colonel Mustard in the Study with the Lead Pipe—but on DOS. Clue Master Detective takes the classic board game and wraps it in moody music, pixelated crime scenes,...