abandonware games sorted by popularity

PGA Tour Golf is an abandoned golf game - the first in the PGA Tour series - designed by Lee Actor and Dennis Koble, developed by Sterling Silver Software and released by Electroni...

City of Lost Children is as beautiful as it is bewildering. Based on the surreal 1995 film, this adventure game drops you into a dark, oily dystopia filled with creepy orphans, biz...

The sequel nobody asked for, but we’re still kinda glad happened. California Games 2 adds even weirder sports: jet-skiing, hang gliding, and bodyboarding, which is like surfi...

Welcome to Z, the real-time strategy game where psychotic robots with British accents duke it out over territory in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Think Command & Conquer if the...

La Abadía del Crimen (1987) is famously unforgiving, and it knows it. Inspired by Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, this is an isometric adventure where breaking the...

Based on a book series almost nobody remembers, Below The Root drops you into a serene world of treehouses, talking children, and deeply philosophical moral choices. Combat does no...

A Personal Nightmare (1989) blends horror and detective work into one spooky little cocktail of 1980s DOS game design. You return to your hometown to find it overrun by demonic pos...

By the time Space Quest 3: The Pirates of Pestulon arrived in 1989, Roger Wilco had become something of a professional survivor. This time he starts the game stranded in a garbage ...

Supremacy: You Will Be Done (also known simply as Overlord) is a rare example of mix between real-time strategy and science fiction themed 4X game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploid, eXterm...

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...

Synidcate Wars takes everything its predecessor did and dials it up to an almost reckless degree, swapping the isometric restraint for full 3D chaos and giving you even more ways t...

Dungeon Hack is a dungeon-crawling role-playing game (RPG) developed by DreamForge Intertainment and published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI). It was released in 1993 for MS-...

In Castle Master, you get dropped into a spooky polygonal castle and told, “Figure it out.” And that’s it. Early 3D graphics make every wall look like it was pain...

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...

Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 (MSFS 4.0) is a flight simulation game released by Microsoft in 1989 for MS-DOS. It was the fourth major version of the Microsoft Flight Simulator se...

Take the tactical seriousness of Championship Manager and sprinkle on some espresso. Championship Manager Italia gives you control over Italy’s finest (and most temperamental...

Ah yes, the game that crawled so Ultima could run. Akalabeth is a wireframe dungeon crawl where you descend into monster-infested labyrinths with the elegance of a lost spreadsheet...

Home Alone attempts to capture the chaotic charm of the film, placing you in the shoes of a child defending a house with questionable safety standards. Released in 1991, it mixes s...

Commander Keen 1: Marooned on Mars is a platform video game developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software in 1990 as shareware for MS-DOS. The game follows the adv...

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...

Grand Prix Circuit is a fascinating early attempt at turning real-world racing into something playable without requiring a steering wheel the size of your desk. In Grand Prix Circu...

John Madden Football was the first of a series of american football sports games sponsored by the coach of the same name. The first John Madden Football is an abandoned game develo...

Escape from Hell asks the important question: what if escaping the underworld were less Dante and more sarcastic road trip? You descend into a demon-infested landscape armed with d...

Released in 1996, Discworld 2: Mortality Bytes! continues the misadventures of Rincewind, who once again proves that cowardice can be a powerful survival tool. This time, Death has...

Creatures Village trades explosions for adorable AI pets in a colorful sandbox world. You raise, teach, and care for Norns—genetically simulated cuties with personalities as ...