abandonware games sorted by popularity

Empire: Wargame of the Century feels like a military textbook that accidentally became entertaining. Spanning centuries of warfare, it combines grand strategy with a surprisingly a...

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is one of the many adaptations of the Terminator franchise. This one is based on the movie of the same name, but it's not as good as the movie, according...

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...

If Doom was the apocalypse, Doom II: Hell on Earth was the encore nobody asked for but everyone wanted. Released in 1994, it doubled down on everything: bigger maps, nastier monste...

Ms. Pac-Man is a classic arcade game released by Midway in 1982 (1984 for DOS) as a follow-up to the original Pac-Man (1980), developed by Namco. While its core gameplay ...

Rodent's Revenge is a puzzle video game originally released in 1991 as part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows. Developed by Christopher Lee Fraley, the game is simple...

The 1990 adaptation of Tim Burton’s Batman hit DOS screens with a moody mix of driving, platforming, and side-scrolling bat-beatdowns. Batman: The Movie swings between genres...

Back in 1984, Zaxxon was the future. Isometric graphics? Whoa. Shadow effects? Mind blown. But mostly, it was a game about flying a chunky spaceship through a heavily fortified spa...

SimCity (or SimCity Classic) is a popular city building simulation in which you, the mayor of a city, have to build a metropolis from the ground up. You can build police and fire d...

Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe is a combat flight simulation game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games (later known as LucasArts) in 1991. It was designed for MS-DOS systems...

Think you’re good at making tough decisions under pressure? Advanced Civilization dares you to prove it by turning diplomacy into passive-aggressive warfare. Based on the cla...

Battle Arena Toshinden was the first game in the Toshinden series and was originally released for the Sony PlayStation in 1995 and later for DOS. Battle Arena Toshinden introd...

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...

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...

Days of Thunder (1990) is what happens when Hollywood’s love affair with Tom Cruise collides with DOS racing. Based on the movie of the same name, it’s an attempt to ca...

Aces of the Pacific (1992, DOS) takes to the skies over WWII’s Pacific Theater, where you can dogfight in legendary aircraft and prove your piloting prowess — or spin i...

EcoQuest 2 takes its environmental message seriously but packages it in a way that’s engaging rather than preachy. You explore lush rainforest environments, solving puzzles t...

Warlords is a fantasy strategy game that turns the world into a massive board game of conquest. You command heroes, raise armies, capture cities, and summon mythical creatures in a...

In 1983, Battlezone asked: what if vector graphics could give you war-induced vertigo? You’re in a tank, in a wireframe world, fighting other tanks. That’s it. But it&r...