abandonware games sorted by popularity

Often regarded as the high point of the series, King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow follows Prince Alexander as he searches for Princess Cassima across the mysterious Land o...

There are games with subtle titles, and then there is Fuck Quest, which clearly decided subtlety was overrated. Released in 1998 for DOS, it belongs to that peculiar era when share...

Black Tiger is a side-scrolling action game packed with monsters, treasure and enough medieval violence to make a quiet afternoon in the countryside seem considerably less attracti...

Empire: Wargame of the Century feels like a military textbook that accidentally became entertaining. Spanning centuries of warfare, it combines grand strategy with a surprisingly a...

Ah, Budokan, the game where patience and discipline meet awkwardly slow combat and the occasional flying kick. You play as a martial arts student training in various dojos, culmina...

Italicized title: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. II: The Two Towers. Continuing the ambitious adaptation of Tolkien’s saga, this sequel expands both the scope a...

If you ever wanted to fly a helicopter that looks like it belongs in a Michael Bay fever dream, Comanche: Maximum Overkill (1992, DOS) is for you. This voxel-powered beast puts you...

Balance of Power: The 1990 Edition is a geopolitical strategy game developed by Chris Crawford and released in 1985. It is considered a classic in the genre of political and strate...

The Smurfs is a bright and cheerful platformer that brings the tiny blue heroes to life in a world full of mushrooms, forests, and cartoon danger. You run, jump, and bounce your wa...

NeoPaint 3.2 is a raster-based graphics editing software designed for DOS. It is a lightweight yet powerful alternative to more complex image editing programs like Photoshop. NeoPa...

Templars, assassins, and a clueless American tourist named George. Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars is a 2D point-and-click masterpiece with more intrigue than a Vatican ba...

The Fellowship of the Ring is an early computer adaptation of Tolkien's famous fantasy novel, following the journey of Frodo and his companions through a dangerous Middle-earth fil...

Half comic book, half arcade game, Batman: The Caped Crusader (1988) offers a delightfully weird aesthetic with its paneled visual style and pulp serial vibe. You’ll punch, p...

Time travel is confusing enough, but Lost in Time (1993, DOS) makes it gloriously absurd. You wake up in a ship’s hold in the 19th century, trying to figure out how you got t...

Alpha Waves is what happens when someone programs a 3D platformer using only triangles and pure imagination. You bounce. That’s it. You bounce through abstract levels that lo...

Pushover is a puzzle platformer video game developed by Red Rat Software and released by Ocean Software in 1992. It was initially available for the Commodore Amiga and later ported...

Transport Tycoon Deluxe expands the original transportation-management formula with more vehicles, larger maps, additional environments, and plenty of opportunities to turn an inno...

One of the best licensed games of the '90s, Blade Runner (1997) puts you in the rain-soaked shoes of Ray McCoy, a detective tracking down replicants in a world where it's always ni...

Police Quest 3: The Kindred is a 1991 adventure game that continues the story of the police simulation series with improved graphics and a more cinematic presentation. Players inve...

Released in 1988, Leisure Suit Larry 2: Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places) sends Larry into an increasingly outrageous international adventure filled with spies, tropi...

Pool of Radiance is a 1988 role-playing classic based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons universe, bringing tabletop fantasy adventures to the computer screen. Players create a par...

Crescent is a mysterious blend of action and intrigue set in a pixelated sci-fi world. The plot is sparse, dropped in cryptic hints as you battle your way through hostile landscape...

Wall Street Raider is less a game about buying a nice office and more an uncompromising simulation of corporate warfare. Released in 1986, it puts you in the role of an ambitious i...

Qix is a 1989 arcade-style puzzle game built around the strangely satisfying task of claiming territory while avoiding a dangerous moving shape. Players guide a marker across the s...

BloodRayne combines third-person action, supernatural horror and a heroine who is considerably better equipped for monster hunting than most people. Rayne, a dhampir working as an ...

If you ever wanted to feel like you were trapped in a washing machine armed with lasers, Descent is your game. Released in 1995, this claustrophobic, six-degrees-of-freedom shooter...

Operation Wolf is a 1989 arcade-style military shooter that puts the player directly into the middle of a dangerous rescue mission. The objective is simple enough: shoot enemies, p...

Released in 1992, Sextris answered a question nobody had urgently asked by combining puzzle mechanics with cheeky adult themes. Beneath the eyebrow-raising presentation lay a surpr...

If spreadsheets are your love language, Capitalism 2 is pure romance. This brutally detailed simulation lets you create your own corporate empire from scratch—manufacturing, ...

By 1994, digging had evolved from arcade twitch action to full-on economic warfare. Diggers on DOS turned mining into a cutthroat competition between quirky alien races, each with ...