abandonware games sorted by popularity

Hook brings the world of Peter Pan into video game form, blending platforming with a light sense of adventure. Released in 1992, it captures the whimsical tone of its source materi...

Released in 1995, Psycho Pinball is what happens when traditional pinball eats too much sugar and loses its mind. It’s loud, colorful, and gleefully unhinged, with four disti...

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...

MechWarrior (1989) was one of the first games to put players inside a 3D cockpit of a giant mech, but it wasn’t just a combat game, it was also an open-ended mercenary RPG, w...

Italicized title: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. II: The Two Towers. Continuing the ambitious adaptation of Tolkien’s saga, this sequel expands both the scope a...

Before Doom, there was Catacomb Abyss, where you throw fireballs down corridors at zombies who all apparently graduated from the same school of slow shuffling. It's a first-person ...

The Incredible Toon Machine is a puzzle video game developed by Jeff Tunnell Productions and published by Sierra On-Line in 1994. It serves as the successor to the game Sid & A...

Gremlins 2: The New Batch leans into the chaos of its source material and then adds a layer of video game unpredictability on top. In Gremlins 2, you deal with enemies that are as ...

Before space marines were gritty and everything exploded in brown and grey, there was The Adventures of Captain Comic. This is early PC platforming in all its clunky, jumpy, 4-colo...

Arachne is a graphical web browser for DOS. Arachne was developed by Michal Polák and released in the early 1990s as a text-mode web browser with limited graphical capabilit...

The adventures of Willy Beamish is a point-and-click adventure that perfectly captures the chaos of being a kid with too much imagination and not enough discipline. Willy is consta...

Before Command & Conquer, there was Command HQ (1990, DOS/Mac)—an early RTS that said “what if we made World War III playable?” It’s global domination m...

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...

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...

Loom is a graphic adventure game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games (now LucasArts). It was designed by Brian Moriarty and is known for its unique gameplay mechanics and em...

Magic Pockets is a platform game developed by The Bitmap Brothers and published by Renegade Software. It was released in 1991 for the Atari ST, Amiga, and MS-DOS platforms. In...

Weird Dreams is an abandoned action - puzzle game developed and released by Rainbird Software in 1988 for DOS, but also published for Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64. Weird Dreams is...

In The Hunt is a side-scrolling shooter that looks like Metal Slug took a deep breath and dove underwater. Released in arcades first and later ported to PC, it’s all about pi...

A murder has been committed on a luxury yacht, and in Cruise for a Corpse, you’re the detective tasked with unraveling the mystery before the killer strikes again. The game u...

If Speedball was a fistfight on skates, Speedball 2 is a televised riot with endorsements. More teams, more power-ups, more everything. The game’s slogan might as well be &ld...

In Altered Destiny, a perfectly average guy named P.J. Barrett gets sucked into a bizarre alien dimension because he answered a phone call. Seriously. What follows is a classic poi...

The Smurfs is a bright and cheerful platformer that brings the tiny blue heroes to life in a world full of mushrooms, forests, and cartoon danger. You run, jump, and bounce your wa...

Ever wanted to get chess lessons from a genius who could crush your soul with a bishop and a glare? Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess (1994, DOS) is your chance. Based on the classic boo...

Long before “quiet quitting” became a buzzword, Dilbert’s Desktop Games captured the soul-crushing absurdity of office life. Released for Windows XP in 1997, this...

Sam & Max Hit the Road is a point-and-click adventure game developed and published by LucasArts. It was released in 1993 and is based on the characters Sam and Max created by c...

The saga continues in Dark Ages Volume II: The Undead Kingdom, where your “Prince of Destiny” status doesn’t earn you a vacation, but instead throws you into a ki...

Bram Stoker's Dracula (the game) is based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the movie) based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the book). Confused yet? Good. This 1993 action-platforme...