abandonware games sorted by popularity

River Raid remake is a 1995 DOS reinterpretation of the classic vertically scrolling shooter, bringing the familiar thrill of flying low over rivers, forests, bridges, and enemy in...

Castles is what happens when SimCity meets Game of Thrones. You design your own fortress, manage the budget, and tell unruly peasants why the walls are more important than food. Be...

Deluxe Paint, often abbreviated as DPaint, was a popular bitmap graphics editor and animation software package. It was developed by Electronic Arts (EA) and released in the mid-198...

Midtown Madness turns the streets of Chicago into one enormous playground for chaotic driving, where racing is only one of several excellent excuses to ignore traffic laws. Players...

Test Drive 3: The Passion takes the “driving simulator” label and adds just enough early-’90s flair to make you feel like a rebel with a V8. Forget endless racetr...

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, ...

Elvira: The Arcade Game trades puzzles for action and subtlety for pure chaos. This is fast, brutal, side-scrolling combat with monsters pouring in from every direction. Elvira&rsq...

ARJ is a file compression utility and file format created by Robert K. Jung. The name "ARJ" stands for "Archived by Robert Jung." It was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s a...

MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients is the sequel to MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy. It is a science fiction role-playing game (RPG) released in 1991, developed by Par...

Ports of Call is a 1989 shipping simulation that puts players in charge of a maritime company where success depends on careful planning and smart decisions. Players buy ships, choo...

Lamborghini: American Challenge (1992) is what happens when arcade racing meets a poster-covered teenage bedroom. You race exotic cars across the U.S., earn money, upgrade vehicles...

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 ...

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe takes the classic globe-trotting detective formula and gives it a more substantial presentation. Carmen Sandiego is still on the run, ...

Ultima 5 takes a darker turn. Lord British is missing, and his regent, Lord Blackthorn, has turned Britannia into a police state where virtues are enforced at sword-point. You know...

Ah, Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior—the game where loincloths are tiny and sword swings are deadly. This 1989 fighter slashed its way onto DOS with decapitations, grunts, and...

A-Train (1992) is the game that proves building a railroad empire can be just as stressful as running an actual train. Available on DOS and Mac, it’s a complex economic simul...

Ultima 2 asks the pressing question: what if you mixed time travel with fantasy and a truly mean sorceress named Minax? The answer is chaos. You’ll bounce between eras—...

Strip Poker 2 takes the familiar poker format and adds the particular incentive suggested by its title. Beneath the novelty, however, there is still a straightforward card game bas...

For those who think snooker is too posh and billiards too French, there's Archer Maclean's Pool, the most ‘90s way to simulate the timeless art of arguing over whether that s...

MechWarrior (1989) was one of the first games to put players inside a 3D cockpit of a giant mech, but it wasn’t just a combat game, it was also an open-ended mercenary RPG, w...

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...

Qix is a 1989 arcade-style puzzle game built around the strangely satisfying task of claiming territory while avoiding a dangerous moving shape. Players guide a marker across the s...

Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament expands the miniature racing formula with more vehicles, more tracks, and a host of new ways to turn tiny cars into surprisingly serious competit...

If you like your RPGs verbose, Betrayal at Krondor is basically a fantasy novel you play. Set in Raymond E. Feist’s Midkemia, the game oozes with narrative depth, detailed ch...

Utopia: The Creation of a Nation challenges you to build and manage a society, which sounds noble until everything starts going wrong at once. Released in 1992, it blends simulatio...

Fable (1996) is one of those DOS curiosities that feels like it was built late at night with equal parts ambition and caffeine. It presents itself as a fantasy role-playing experie...

Space exploration reaches impressive heights in Master of Orion, a strategy classic that challenges players to guide an interstellar civilization toward galactic supremacy. Coloniz...

Master of Magic remains one of the finest fantasy strategy games ever created, blending empire building with spellcasting in a world where powerful wizards compete for absolute dom...

Before “yippee-ki-yay” became gaming shorthand for chaos, Die Hard (1989) tried to capture the movie’s skyscraper shootout on DOS. You play as John McClane, trapp...

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...