abandonware games sorted by popularity

WordStar 4 was a popular word processing software program during the early days of personal computing. WordStar 4 included features typical of word processors in that era, all...

King’s Bounty is a turn-based strategy game with RPG elements, originally released in 1990 by New World Computing. It was created by Jon Van Caneghem, also known for the Migh...

Back in 1992, The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel set the bar for pixelated deduction. A famous actress is dead, and every gentleman in London seems...

Forget Rambo. Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines is what happens when you drop six experts behind Nazi lines and tell them to behave tactically… or else. Every mission is a deadl...

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...

D/Generation is a slick blend of action, puzzle-solving, and corporate dystopia. You’re a courier dropped into a high-security biotech facility to deliver a package, only to ...

The Neuromancer video game, released in 1988 by Interplay Productions, is an adventure/role-playing game loosely based on William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984...

Beneath a Steel Sky is a classic point-and-click adventure game released in 1994, developed by Revolution Software. Set in a dystopian, cyberpunk future, the game is renowned for i...

Super Space Invaders takes the old “shoot the aliens before they land” formula and pours a shot of espresso into it. The result? Faster, flashier, and mildly panic-indu...

La Abadía del Crimen (1987) is famously unforgiving, and it knows it. Inspired by Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, this is an isometric adventure where breaking the...

Released in 1988 for DOS, Wasteland is the kind of game that quietly changed history while pretending to be just another post-apocalyptic RPG. Long before wastelands were fashionab...

After publishing a plethora of Gold Box titles, SSI decided to release a fantasy RPG based on the Forgotten Realms scenarios of Dungeons & Dragons where the player could create...

With a title like Dogfight: 80 Years of Aerial Warfare, you know you’re in for a serious history lesson disguised as a game. Released in 1993, this DOS flight sim spans decad...

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...

By 1996, Street Fighter 2: Championship Edition on DOS felt like the veteran fighter returning for one last round. You could finally play as the bosses, which was a childhood dream...

Amberstar is a fantasy old school RPG very similar to Ultima 6 that uses a top-down view for interiors and small locations and a first person pseudo 3D view for everything else. Un...

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...

Wizardry III: Legacy of Llylgamyn is a classic role-playing video game developed by Sir-Tech and released in 1983. It is the third installment in the Wizardry series. Original...

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...

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...

Populous 2: Trials of the Olympian Gods is a classic sandbox strategy god game. As the title suggests, its setting is loosely based on ancient Greek mythology, and you play as a de...

This sequel takes the same D&D-in-space formula and tries to go bigger, bolder, and... okay, maybe just more complicated. Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed continues the galactic strug...