abandonware games sorted by popularity

Mean Streets (1989) throws you into a gritty sci-fi detective story where neon lights, flying cars, and criminal conspiracies are just part of a normal workday. You play as a priva...

Sid Meier took one look at Earth and said, “Let’s leave this dump.” Thus, Alpha Centauri (1999, Windows XP) was born - a 4X strategy game that takes Civilization ...

Quake II is a first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and released in 1997. It is the sequel to the original Quake and was a significant milestone in the evolution...

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...

Based on a book series almost nobody remembers, Below The Root drops you into a serene world of treehouses, talking children, and deeply philosophical moral choices. Combat does no...

By the time Alone in the Dark 3 (1994, DOS) rolls around, Edward Carnby has seen it all - so now it’s off to the Wild West, because of course it is. Zombies? Check. Cowboys? ...

Karnov is a classic side-scrolling action arcade game developed by Data East in 1987. The game features a unique protagonist named Jinborov Karnovski, or "Karnov", a fire-breathing...

Cosmic Spacehead is a cheerful point-and-click adventure wrapped in platformer segments, starring a purple alien who’s equal parts explorer and goofball. You’ll travel ...

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 ...

If you ever wanted to command the Pacific fleet without getting wet, Carrier Strike is your game. Set during WWII, it’s a turn-based wargame where numbers, radar, and weather...

In Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, Sierra took the Wild West and decided it needed more jokes, more puns, and significantly more medical malpractice. Released in 1993, this po...

Phantasmagoria is a point-and-click horror adventure game developed and published by Sierra On-Line, released in 1995. Directed by Roberta Williams, Phantasmagoria departed from Si...

In the 25th century, bureaucracy is still awful—but now you also have laser guns. Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday is a surprisingly solid sci-fi RPG that blends space oper...

If Sorcerer Lord was about controlling armies, Sorcerian (1990, DOS) zooms in to the party level — a side-scrolling RPG that’s as odd as it is ambitious. You build a te...

Lexi-Cross is an abandoned science fiction tv show-styled puzzle game. Lexi-Cross was developed by Platinumware and released for DOS by Interplay Productions in 1991. The gameplay ...

If you’ve ever wanted to feel intellectually inferior to a few hundred lines of 1981 code, Chess is your game. This digital board doesn’t bother with graphics flair or ...

Before Doom, there was Catacomb Abyss, where you throw fireballs down corridors at zombies who all apparently graduated from the same school of slow shuffling. It's a first-person ...