abandonware games sorted by popularity

Circuit's Edge is a cyberpunk-themed role-playing game developed by Westwood Associates and published by Infocom. It was released in 1990 for MS-DOS. Set in a dystopian future, Cir...

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...

Karadoc’s back, and apparently inflation hit the dungeon economy hard—he wants his gold! Cadaver: The Payoff is less a sequel and more a direct continuation, like findi...

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...

Atomix is a tile-based puzzle game released in 1990 by Thalion Software for platforms like Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS, and Commodore 64. The objective of Atomix is to assemble mo...

If Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon were a person, it would be that eccentric uncle who insists he once met a genie “for real.” This 1988 Arabian-fantasy adventure m...

Stunt Car Racer is an abandoned first-person 3D perspective racing game designed by Geoffrey J. Crammond, developed and released by Microstyle in 1989 for DOS and many other platfo...

Yes, Astrotit (1987) is really the name, and no, it’s not what you think — though it does feel like it was named by a bored teenager. This side-scrolling shooter puts y...

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...

SimEarth is a simulation in which you can shape and mold a planet in almost every way you can imagine. In SimEarth our planet is simulated as a whole: life, climate, atmosphere are...

StarCraft is a classic RTS (Real-Time Strategy) game developed by Blizzard Entertainment and released in 1998 for Windows and Macintosh. StarCraft takes the Warcraft experience to ...

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...

Blades of Steel is hockey the way it was meant to be. Fast, brutal, and occasionally resembling a bar fight on ice. The game lets you punch other players mid-match and the announce...

If Speedball was a fistfight on skates, Speedball 2 is a televised riot with endorsements. More teams, more power-ups, more everything. The game’s slogan might as well be &ld...

One-Nil Soccer Manager is a text-based soccer management simulation game that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was developed for various home computer systems, inc...

Welcome to Z, the real-time strategy game where psychotic robots with British accents duke it out over territory in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Think Command & Conquer if the...

Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant is a first-person perspective party-based RPG developed and released by Sir-tech Software in 1992 for Windows, Linux and DOS. Wizardry 7 ...