abandonware games sorted by popularity

Hired Guns is what happens when someone looks at a dungeon crawler and thinks, “Yes, but what if it were louder, messier, and slightly unhinged?” Released in 1993, this squad-b...

World Class Leader Board is a classic golf simulation that takes a fairly serious approach to the ancient art of hitting a tiny ball into a distant hole. Rather than turning golf i...

Few games deserve the title of “classic” more than Day of the Tentacle (1993). It’s Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman at their weirdest, giving us time travel, mutant...

The ninja ant is back—and this time, he brought a friend. Zool 2 doubles down on the sugar-fueled mayhem of the first game with more levels, more enemies, and even more inexp...

Warheads is a turn-based artillery game in the grand tradition of blowing your friends to pieces with ridiculous weapons. You control a team of tiny, heavily armed soldiers and tak...

Fast Tracker 2 is one of the defining music-tracking programs of the DOS era and a major piece of computer-music history. Rather than behaving like a traditional recording studio, ...

Dive, dive! This 1989 DOS simulator puts you in control of a nuclear submarine, though most of the action involves pushing buttons and waiting very patiently. Think of it as the &l...

From the creators of Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace (1989, DOS) is a gloriously over-the-top animated adventure where timing is everything — literally. You play Ace, a muscle...

First Samurai is a classic action-platformer game originally released in 1991. The game was initially available on the Amiga and Atari ST, with later ports to the Commodore 64, DOS...

SkyGlobe is an astronomy software that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was a DOS-based planetarium program that allowed users to explore the night sky in real-tim...

Contra: Locked and Loaded is like caffeine in video game form—fast, explosive, and just a little dangerous for your health. You’re running, you’re gunning, and yo...

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...

Sports management usually involves tactics, budgets, and serious planning. M.U.D.S. - Mean Ugly Dirty Sport decides those are merely optional suggestions. This delightfully outrage...

DX-Ball 2 is a popular brick-breaking game that was first released in 1998 by Longbow Digital Arts. It serves as a sequel to the original DX-Ball, which was inspired by the classic...

Mega Man 3 continues the formula with even more inventive levels, memorable music, and an expanded selection of Robot Masters waiting to test your skills. Sliding mechanics increas...

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...

Spy Hunter is a 1984 DOS version of the classic arcade action game, putting the player behind the wheel of a heavily armed sports car with a very simple mission: drive fast and mak...

Monster Truck Madness (1996) is proof that “subtlety” and “monster trucks” don’t belong in the same sentence. With Microsoft at the wheel, you’r...

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...

Ever dreamt of running ancient Rome without the toga chafing? Caesar hands you the reins of a budding province and expects you to not burn it to the ground—ideally. This city...

Night Shift is a 1990 action game with a wonderfully unusual premise: instead of saving the world, the player is busy working a night shift. Naturally, this is not an ordinary job,...

Wipeout is a futuristic racing game built around speed, aggressive competition, and vehicles that apparently have no interest whatsoever in ordinary road safety. The anti-gravity c...

Long before Minecraft let us build worlds, Adventure Construction Set handed you a digital Lego box and said, “Go nuts.” Want to make a dungeon full of orcs and ham san...

Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures is a charmingly odd experiment that shrinks globe-trotting archaeology into bite-sized missions designed for quick play sessions. Viewed fr...

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...

Ultra Mortal Kombat Vendetta is a fan-made love letter to excessive violence and familiar characters, created well after the peak of the franchise it imitates. It throws subtlety o...

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is a point-and-click adventure game developed and published by Sierra On-Line. It was released in 1993 and designed by Jane Jensen. The game is ...

Ninja Rabbits is a 1992 platform game that takes the concept of the ninja and adds a rabbit, because apparently the genre had not yet reached its full potential for unusual protago...

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 Solvers: OutNumbered! takes arithmetic and turns it into a frantic chase against villains, proving that mathematics becomes considerably more interesting when somebody is try...