abandonware games sorted by popularity

Before he became better known as Alien Carnage, Halloween Harry blasted onto DOS PCs in 1993 with fast action, crude humor, and zero interest in subtlety. You play Harry, armed to ...

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 ...

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...

Visual Basic 3 (VB3) is a programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) released by Microsoft in 1993. It is part of the Visual Basic (VB) series, which is know...

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans is the first real-time fantasy strategy game from Blizzard Entertainment. Two separate story lines (Orcs and Humans) evolve with 12 scenarios per side t...

In The Lost Vikings (1993, DOS), three Viking warriors with more brawn than brains find themselves kidnapped by aliens. Instead of raiding villages, they’re solving puzzles w...

Quarantine is a futuristic racing/driving game released by GameTek in 1994 for DOS. Quarantine is set in a dark dystopian futuristic city where the player drives around in a taxi c...

Do you find spreadsheets thrilling? Does the idea of profit margins make your heart race? Then Business Simulator is your kind of party. It’s all about running a faceless com...

Take American football, remove the rules, add swords and fireballs, and throw in some screaming. That is Brutal Sports Football. This is not about touchdowns. This is about surviva...

Before Pixar made you cry with a lamp and a toy cowboy, there was 3D Studio 3 on DOS. Released in 1993, this was the go-to tool for aspiring animators who didn’t mind waiting...

A Personal Nightmare (1989) blends horror and detective work into one spooky little cocktail of 1980s DOS game design. You return to your hometown to find it overrun by demonic pos...

Forget Freddy’s razor glove for a second - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1989) for DOS is terrifying in its own way. Mostly because of the controls. You play as a teen trying to...

Adventure Game Studio (AGS) is a software development tool that enables users to create point-and-click adventure games. It was originally created by Chris Jones and has been used ...

If you ever wanted to run a football club without leaving your chair, The Manager (1991, DOS) delivers. This early management sim lets you buy players, balance budgets, and suffer ...

Midtown Madness is a car racing game developed by Angel Studios (later known as Rockstar San Diego) and released by Microsoft in 1999 for Windows. Midtown Madness is know...

Mortal Kombat is one of the most popular one-on-one fighting games, and it's no surprise that it has spawned numerous sequels. Players choose from seven digitized characters and ba...

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 ...

Amerzone is like stepping into a dream where logic is optional and atmosphere is everything. You play a journalist unraveling the mystery of a dying explorer’s last journey, ...

Ah yes, the game that crawled so Ultima could run. Akalabeth is a wireframe dungeon crawl where you descend into monster-infested labyrinths with the elegance of a lost spreadsheet...

Alien Trilogy is a first-person shooter video game released in 1996 for various platforms, including the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and MS-DOS. Developed by Probe Entertainment and ...

Turbo Pascal 7 (TP7) is a programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was developed by Borland as an ev...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a humorous free text adventure game based on the novel of the same name written by Douglas Adams (if you never read it, shame on you!). The ...