abandonware games sorted by popularity

Dungeon Keeper 3: War for the Overworld is the ghost of a game that never was. Announced, teased, and then buried alive by shifting studio priorities, it exists only in the fever d...

Wizardry 4: The Return of Werdna flips the script by letting you play the villain, which is as delightful as it is diabolical. You control Werdna, an evil wizard with a knack for c...

Snood is a charming puzzle game built around matching colorful creatures and clearing them from the screen before things get out of hand. Released in 1996, it looks deceptively sim...

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...

Released in 1996, Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love for Sail sends Larry aboard a luxurious cruise where romance, mystery, and comedy collide with spectacular enthusiasm. The hand-drawn a...

Ever wanted to manage a kingdom, lead armies, go dungeon-crawling, and attend budget meetings? Birthright: The Gorgon’s Alliance makes all your fantasy micromanagement dreams...

Rampart is what happens when someone mashes Tetris, tower defense, and medieval warfare into a single frantic loop. You rebuild crumbling castle walls using oddly shaped bricks, th...

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom arrived in 1989 with a simple objective: survive collapsing mines, hostile cultists, and endless hazards without losing your fedora. Based on t...

BloodRayne combines third-person action, supernatural horror and a heroine who is considerably better equipped for monster hunting than most people. Rayne, a dhampir working as an ...

SimLife is a 1992 life simulation that allows players to create and manipulate ecosystems, experimenting with plants, animals, environments, genetics, and evolutionary development....

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...

Times of Lore is an action-oriented fantasy adventure that sends the player into a medieval world filled with monsters, villages, quests and plenty of reasons to keep a sword withi...

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...

Explosions? Check. Missiles? Check. Graphics that look like someone spilled gray soup on your monitor? Double check. A-10 Tank Killer lets you pilot a flying war machine and rain c...

Skale Tracker is a music tracker designed for composing and arranging electronic music on a computer, continuing a tradition that began with classic tracker software on Amiga and D...

In Color Lines (1992, DOS), colors aren’t just pretty—they're plotting your demise. You match five or more balls in a row before your screen becomes a chaotic rainbow p...

Yes, it’s called Fish!, and yes, it’s as quirky as the exclamation mark suggests. This is a puzzle-platformer with personality, placing you in surreal environments that...

In 1996, Diablo descended onto PCs and basically defined the “click until everything dies” genre. The gothic town of Tristram sits atop a dungeon stuffed with demons, l...

It Came from the Desert is a cinematic masterpiece of giant ants, paranoia, and 1950s sci-fi homage. Released in 1990 for DOS, it blends action, strategy, and storytelling into a u...

Alien Legacy (1994) is like SimCity crashed into Star Trek and nobody called the insurance company. It’s a real-time strategy/simulation game that has you managing a colony i...

Released in 1992, Dylan Dog: Murderers brings Italy’s most famous nightmare investigator to the DOS screen with all the moody atmosphere you’d expect. It’s part p...

Before Half-Life, there was Chasm: The Rift, a game where time-traveling mutants explode into limbs and every room looks like it was decorated by a doom-metal band. A first-person ...

Risk: The World Conquest Game is a 1989 DOS version of the famous strategy board game, offering players the familiar objective of controlling territories and eventually conquering ...

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...

Karateka combines cinematic storytelling with martial arts action in a way that was remarkably ambitious for its time. Players guide a lone warrior through a fortress filled with g...

Simple concepts often age remarkably well, and Mah Jongg Solitaire proves the point beautifully. The objective is straightforward: remove matching tiles while ensuring each selecti...

In this 1990 point-and-click adventure, you find yourself in Las Vegas with no memory of how you got there. Solve puzzles, gather clues, and uncover the mystery behind your amnesia...

7 Colors is one of those puzzle games that sounds simple on paper but ends up consuming your entire afternoon before you even realize it. Released in 1991 for DOS, it throws you in...

Impossible Mission 2 proves that espionage is mostly about jumping carefully and avoiding suspicious furniture. Released in 1988 for DOS, this sequel expands on the original's plat...

Comix Zone (1995, Windows XP) is what happens when a comic book artist gets pulled into his own creation and reacts by roundhouse-kicking everything in sight. Stylized to the max, ...