abandonware games sorted by popularity

If you’ve ever dreamed of being a grumpy bearded guy swinging an axe and saving the world before second breakfast, Bloodstone: an Epic Dwarven Tale is your jam. Released in 1...

Sherlock Holmes: Another Bow is a 1985 DOS adventure featuring Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective in a mystery that requires observation, deduction, and a willingness to investi...

Space Quest 2: Vohaul’s Revenge continues Roger Wilco’s improbable rise from janitor to cosmic trouble magnet. This 1987 sequel ups the stakes by kidnapping Roger and t...

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...

Released for DOS in 1990, Last Ninja 2: Back with a Vengeance expands upon its predecessor with improved visuals, larger environments, and even more demanding challenges. The moder...

In 1998, Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War decided the world needed fewer corridors and more cosmic dogfights. Instead of bumping into walls like a drunken astronaut, you&rs...

Sherlock Holmes: The Vatican Cameos is a 1986 DOS adventure built around a Sherlock Holmes mystery and the detective's trademark combination of observation, deduction, and careful ...

The classic bomb-defusing, platform-hopping, enemy-dodging chaos of Bomb Jack gets a fresh coat of pixels in this 2002 DOS remake. You’re still the tiny superhero hopping aro...

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...

Released in 1989, Lakers vs. Celtics and the NBA Playoffs is pure old-school sports gaming: simple to learn, hard to master, and endlessly competitive. The presentation is minimal,...

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...

Supremacy: Your Will Be Done is a grand strategy game with a suitably enormous ambition: conquer space, expand your empire, manage resources, and generally become the sort of inter...

Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol is a deep dungeon-crawling role-playing game designed for players who enjoy building powerful characters one dangerous expedition at a time. The under...

Theme Park turns amusement-park management into a colorful strategy game where every roller coaster, burger stand and souvenir shop can become part of your grand financial empire. ...

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 ...

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is a strange but fascinating blend of adventure game, RPG, and comedy horror. You wander through a spooky mansion, solve puzzles, fight monsters, and g...

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...

Despite its familiar title, Mario and Luigi for DOS offers a very different experience from Nintendo's famous adventures. Created outside the official series, it delivers straightf...

If System Shock was a warning, System Shock 2 is the full-blown nightmare that follows. This time, the horror seeps into every corner of the experience, blending RPG mechanics with...

Borland Turbo Pascal 1.0 was the first release of one of the most influential programming environments of the 1980s. It brought Pascal development to DOS in a package that was rema...

Based on the cult fantasy novels by Roger Zelazny, 9 Princes in Amber is a 1985 text adventure that assumes two things: you’ve read the books, and you enjoy typing things lik...

Armored Fist is all about tanks. Big, heavy, no-nonsense tanks. It's essentially a driving sim for people who think speed is overrated and armor is fashion. Missions involve slow, ...

The sequel no one expected takes our trench-coated hero from gothic horror to gangster ghost story. Yes, Alone in the Dark 2 (1993, DOS) swaps Lovecraftian horror for Tommy guns an...

The Amazing Spider-Man and Captain America in Dr. Doom's Revenge! is a crossover that feels like a comic book come to life, complete with iconic heroes and a villain who clearly en...

Afterlife is a simulation strategy game developed and published by LucasArts. It was released in 1996 for Microsoft Windows and later made available on other platforms. The game wa...

Templars, assassins, and a clueless American tourist named George. Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars is a 2D point-and-click masterpiece with more intrigue than a Vatican ba...

Spacewar is one of the earliest digital computer games and is often considered the first interactive video game. It was created in 1962 by Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne W...

Tristan Pinball is a digital pinball table from an era when computer hardware was expected to imitate a real arcade machine despite having considerably fewer pixels and absolutely ...

By the time Alone in the Dark 3 (1994, DOS) rolls around, Edward Carnby has seen it all - so now it’s off to the Wild West, because of course it is. Zombies? Check. Cowboys? ...

If Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon were a person, it would be that eccentric uncle who insists he once met a genie “for real.” This 1988 Arabian-fantasy adventure m...