abandonware games sorted by popularity

There’s something oddly poetic about 8088 Othello, a 1985 take on the classic board game that feels like it was programmed by someone who had a personal vendetta against flas...

Time travel is confusing enough, but Lost in Time (1993, DOS) makes it gloriously absurd. You wake up in a ship’s hold in the 19th century, trying to figure out how you got t...

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Action Game from 1989 takes the same beloved film and asks a crucial question: what if archaeology required more jumping? This adaptation tr...

Fast Food Tycoon turns the humble hamburger restaurant into a full management challenge. You must choose locations, design your business, manage staff, handle finances, and keep cu...

Renegade is a 1988 DOS beat 'em up that puts players in the role of a tough street fighter battling gangs through urban environments. The basic formula is wonderfully direct: walk ...

Italy 1990 captures the football fever of the World Cup with arcade-style simplicity and competitive energy. Released during the tournament itself, it thrives on accessibility and ...

DOS Navigator v1.5 is a classic file manager built for users who wanted something more capable than the standard DOS command line. It provides a text-based environment for browsing...

Then there’s Martian Dreams, the Ultima game where you travel to Mars in the 19th century with none other than Sigmund Freud and Nikola Tesla. Yes, it’s as delightfully...

Heretic is what happens when someone looks at fantasy and thinks it needs more fireballs and a lot more attitude. Built on familiar shooter foundations, it swaps sci-fi corridors f...

NeoPaint 3.2 is a raster-based graphics editing software designed for DOS. It is a lightweight yet powerful alternative to more complex image editing programs like Photoshop. NeoPa...

Gold of the Americas: The Conquest of the New World is a strategy game that invites you to rewrite history, usually by making the same mistakes but with more confidence. You manage...

War never changes—but it does get oddly cute in Cannon Fodder. Guide your tiny commandos through missions filled with explosions, carnage, and dark humor. The game mixes arca...

In Countdown, the clock is always ticking—literally. This spy thriller adventure drops you into a web of international intrigue, shady characters, and puzzles that don’...

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...

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...

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is a point-and-click adventure game developed and published by Sierra On-Line. It was released in 1993 and designed by Jane Jensen. The game is ...

L'Empereur (1991) is one of those games that looks at Napoleon and says, “Yes, but what if we made it complicated?” This DOS strategy title drops you straight into the ...

Super Solvers: Operation Neptune is an educational adventure that combines underwater exploration with lessons disguised as missions. Players take part in a submarine-themed journe...

Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire takes the Ultima formula somewhere considerably less medieval, sending the player into a lost jungle world filled with dinosaurs, strange cultur...

The Temple of Apshai Trilogy is a series of classic role-playing games developed by Automated Simulations (later known as Epyx) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These games were ...

Elona looks innocent, almost cute, and then immediately proves it has no interest in your comfort. This roguelike RPG is bizarre, unpredictable, and gleefully cruel. You can become...

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...

Before Street Fighter became a cultural juggernaut, it was this humble 1988 DOS brawler where Ryu’s fists felt more like sluggish bricks than blazing fireballs. The controls ...

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, ...

Released in 1991, Lemmings introduced one of the most unforgettable puzzle concepts ever created. Players must guide an army of tiny green-haired creatures toward safety by assigni...

Step into the polygonal shoes of Edward Carnby (or Emily Hartwood, if you're feeling bold) in Alone in the Dark, the grandfather of survival horror games. Released in 1992 for DOS,...

Ivan 'Iron Man' Stewart's Super Off Road is an abandoned diagonal-down off-road racing game developed by Leland and released by Virgin Interactive in 1990 for DOS, but also publish...

Return to Castle Wolfenstein revives the classic Wolfenstein name with a modern first-person shooter built around secret laboratories, Nazi experiments, supernatural forces, and an...

Crusaders of the Dark Savant is a sprawling saga with enough content to make your eyes bleed and your fingers cramp. The game blends strategy, exploration, and role-playing with a ...

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...