abandonware games sorted by popularity

Scorched Earth (1991) was the “mother of all games” long before Doom took the title. Two or more tanks face off on a randomly generated terrain, and your only mission i...

Now with 27% more diplomacy and 300% more frustration! Axis and Allies: Iron Blitz (1999) takes everything from the original game and throws in extra scenarios, improved AI, and mo...

Microsoft Decathlon challenges players to compete in ten demanding track-and-field events, including running, jumping, throwing, and several activities specifically designed to mak...

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—...

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 ...

Paperboy is a 1988 arcade classic that transforms the seemingly ordinary profession of newspaper delivery into a hazardous athletic event. Players ride a bicycle through suburban s...

Alpha Waves is what happens when someone programs a 3D platformer using only triangles and pure imagination. You bounce. That’s it. You bounce through abstract levels that lo...

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...

Silent Service is a 1985 submarine simulation that puts players in command of an American submarine during World War II. The game combines navigation, sonar, targeting, torpedo att...

Bigger, deeper, and just as punishing, Gengis Khan 2: Clan of the Gray Wolf (1992) expands the formula with more maps, more rulers, and more ways to fail spectacularly. Want to uni...

F-14 Tomcat is the kind of flight simulator that makes you feel like you should be wearing aviator sunglasses and chewing gum while sitting at your desk. Released at the height of ...

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...

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...

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...

Aleshar: World of Ice is what happens when someone says, “Let’s make an RPG, but crank the realism to 11.” Set in a cold, brutal land where your sword arm is only...

Gorillas, also known as "Gorillas.bas," is a turn-based artillery game that was included as a sample program with Microsoft QBasic, an IDE and interpreter for a variant of the...

The Ancient Art of War is one of those games whose title sounds as though it should be carved into a stone tablet, and its ambition certainly matches the name. Released in 1984, it...

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...

In Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, Sierra took the Wild West and decided it needed more jokes, more puns, and significantly more medical malpractice. Released in 1993, this po...

Eishockey Manager is proof that spreadsheets can, in fact, be thrilling—if you really love ice hockey. Released in 1993, this is a hardcore management sim that skips the flas...

American McGee's Alice takes Lewis Carroll's Wonderland and gives it a decidedly darker makeover. Alice is no longer simply wandering through a whimsical fantasy populated by eccen...

Released in 1984, Hack is one of those games that quietly shaped an entire genre while pretending not to care if you understood it or not. This early roguelike doesn’t bother...

Time travel stories tend to get complicated quickly, and Future Wars: Adventures in Time embraces that chaos with enthusiasm. Released in 1990, this cinematic adventure casts you a...

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 ...

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...

Just like the movie, Batman Returns (1992) is dark, gritty, and full of dudes in clown makeup getting punched in the face. You play as the Caped Crusader in a beat-‘em-up sid...

Amberstar is a fantasy old school RPG very similar to Ultima 6 that uses a top-down view for interiors and small locations and a first person pseudo 3D view for everything else. Un...

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...

Based on a classic Chinese novel, Bandit Kings of Ancient China combines strategy, RPG elements, and about 800 names you’ll never remember. You play one of 108 outlaws trying...

Icewind Dale arrived in 2000 as a frosty sibling to the Baldur's Gate formula, trading political intrigue for glorious dungeon crawling in the forgotten corners of the Forgotten Re...