abandonware games sorted by popularity

Stunt Car Racer is an abandoned first-person 3D perspective racing game designed by Geoffrey J. Crammond, developed and released by Microstyle in 1989 for DOS and many other platfo...

Let’s be honest: Cobra Mission is remembered less for its RPG mechanics and more for its... risqué content. The first “eroge” RPG translated into English, ...

Based on the cult comedy film, Wayne’s World (1993, DOS) is loud, weird, and occasionally frustrating—much like its source material. This platformer throws Wayne and Ga...

Monkey Island 2 is the second game of the Monkey Island series, a point and click adventure game set in a world of pirates and mysterious treasures. Monkey Island 2 utilizes a comm...

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...

Alternate Reality: The City is a role-playing video game developed by Paradise Programming for various platforms including Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, and Commodore 64. It was released ...

The Ancient Art of War is a classic video game that was released in the late 1980s. Developed by Evryware and published by Broderbund, it was available on various platforms, includ...

Doh is back, and he’s mad - presumably because no one understood what he was in the first place. Arkanoid 2 takes the original formula and dials everything up: more levels, m...

Ah yes, Blood (1997)—the cheerful little game where you rise from the grave, wield a pitchfork, and quote evil-sounding movie lines while setting cultists on fire. It’s...

Take Eddie Murphy’s swagger, remove the charm, add some DOS chiptunes, and you get Beverly Hills Cop—a game adaptation that asks: “What if being a wisecracking de...

Welcome to Z, the real-time strategy game where psychotic robots with British accents duke it out over territory in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Think Command & Conquer if the...

Frederik Pohl’s Gateway is science fiction that doesn’t hold your hand—or particularly care if you survive. Based on Pohl’s novel, this 1992 adventure drops...

Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 is a simulation game developed by Chris Sawyer Productions and published by Infogrames. It was released in 2002 as the sequel to the original  classic ...

Blackthorne (1994) is what happens when a '90s action hero gets lost in a side-scrolling alien world and decides to shoot everything until it makes sense. You’re Kyle, a shot...

By 1994, point-and-click adventures were everywhere, but Dragonsphere carved out its niche with lush graphics, an intriguing plot, and plenty of puzzles. You play a young king task...

World Class Leader Board is a golf simulation game developed and published by Access Software and released in the late 1980s for various platforms, including the Commodore 64, Amig...

Altered Beast is a classic side-scrolling beat 'em up arcade game developed and published by Sega. It was originally released in arcades in 1988 and later ported to various home co...

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...

Bigger, darker, and just as merciless, Dungeon Master II: The Legend of Skullkeep doubled down on everything that made the first game great—and slightly unhinged. Released in...

Think you’re good at making tough decisions under pressure? Advanced Civilization dares you to prove it by turning diplomacy into passive-aggressive warfare. Based on the cla...

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...

Before James Bond was saving the world with cinematic flair, he was crashing pixelated helicopters in 007: License to Kill. This top-down action game takes the movie and crams it i...

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...

GW-BASIC (short for Gee Whiz BASIC) is a dialect of the BASIC programming language that was developed by Microsoft. It's one of the early implementations of BASIC and was included ...