abandonware games sorted by popularity

In Teenage Queen, you step into the awkward, melodramatic shoes of a young woman navigating romance, school drama, and questionable life decisions. It feels like someone turned a s...

Xenon 2: Megablast is a classic shoot'em up developed by Bitmap Brothers and released by Image Works in 1990 for DOS and for a plethora of other systems. Xenon was good, Xenon 2 wa...

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...

Before James Bond was saving the world with cinematic flair, he was crashing pixelated helicopters in 007: License to Kill. This top-down action game takes the movie and crams it i...

Drakkhen (1989) was weird—wonderfully, gloriously weird. A 3D RPG before 3D was really ready, it let you roam a strange fantasy world full of surreal landscapes, bizarre enem...

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-...

Billy’s babysitter has been abducted by aliens, and he’s not having it. Commander Keen 6: Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter! is the series at its most Saturday-morning-cartoon ...

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I is an abandoned fantasy top-down DOS RPG game set in the The Lord of the Rings universe. The Lord of the Rings I was developed a...

Taito’s Puzznic (1990) takes the idea of matching tiles and injects a surprising amount of strategy. You slide blocks to align pairs, but each move requires forethought&mdash...

Screamer (1995) was the moment when PC gamers realized DOS could, in fact, go fast. A blistering arcade racer inspired by Daytona USA, it delivered glossy graphics, roaring engines...

Mega lo Mania, also known as Mega-Lo-Mania: The Battle for Elysium in some regions, is a real-time strategy (RTS) video game developed by Sensible Software and published by Image W...

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...

The Simpsons Arcade Game, developed and published by Konami, is a classic side-scrolling beat-'em-up that became highly popular in arcades during the early '90s. Players take ...

Sid Meier's Colonization is Civilization’s scrappy, historically charged cousin. You start with a tiny ship and a dream: exploit the New World before the other European power...

Police Quest 2: The Vengeance is a graphical point-and-click adventure game developed and published by Sierra On-Line. It was released in 1988 as the second installment in the...

The Amazing Spider-Man and Captain America in Dr. Doom's Revenge! is a crossover that feels like a comic book come to life, complete with iconic heroes and a villain who clearly en...

Eishockey Manager is proof that spreadsheets can, in fact, be thrilling—if you really love ice hockey. Released in 1993, this is a hardcore management sim that skips the flas...

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 ...

The adventures of Willy Beamish is a point-and-click adventure that perfectly captures the chaos of being a kid with too much imagination and not enough discipline. Willy is consta...

This isn’t Disney’s musical fairytale—it’s a DOS game, which means Beauty and the Beast is way more "puzzle platformer" than "tale as old as time." You play...

Altered Beast is a classic side-scrolling beat 'em up arcade game developed and published by Sega. It was originally released in arcades in 1988 and later ported to various home co...

Back in 1984, Zaxxon was the future. Isometric graphics? Whoa. Shadow effects? Mind blown. But mostly, it was a game about flying a chunky spaceship through a heavily fortified spa...

Test Drive 3: The Passion takes the “driving simulator” label and adds just enough early-’90s flair to make you feel like a rebel with a V8. Forget endless racetr...

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...

The title Dinosaur Balls might raise eyebrows today, but in 1992 it was just a quirky DOS puzzle game. Think of it as prehistoric Bubble Bobble: you fire colored spheres to match a...