abandonware games sorted by popularity

By 1994, point-and-click adventures were everywhere, but Dragonsphere carved out its niche with lush graphics, an intriguing plot, and plenty of puzzles. You play a young king task...

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...

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...

The Ancient Art of War is a classic video game that was released in the late 1980s. Developed by Evryware and published by Broderbund, it was available on various platforms, includ...

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is a role-playing video game that was first released in 1981. It's one of the pioneering titles in the dungeon-crawling genre and one ...

Lure of the Temptress (1992, DOS) is dark fantasy done right — with muddy streets, suspicious peasants, and a villainess who’s equal parts charm and cruelty. As Diermot...

Sid Meier took one look at Earth and said, “Let’s leave this dump.” Thus, Alpha Centauri (1999, Windows XP) was born - a 4X strategy game that takes Civilization ...

Space Quest 4: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers takes the series into the wonderfully chaotic territory of time travel. Released in 1991, it gleefully tosses Roger across multiple ...

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...

Laura Bow 2: The Dagger of Amon Ra is a point-and-click adventure game developed and published by Sierra On-Line in 1992. The game is a sequel to The Colonel's Bequest and follows ...

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...

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—...

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...

Telengard is one of the earliest computer role-playing games, released in 1982 for various home computers like the Commodore 64, Apple II, and TRS-80 and later for PC. It was devel...

In Allan Border’s Cricket (1993), you get to live the thrill of... waiting. A lot. But when the action kicks in, it’s surprisingly engaging. Named after the Australian ...

Ever wanted to pilot a walking death machine through a series of exploding industrial hellscapes while being shot at from every angle? Welcome to Amok. This 1996 mech-shooter is a ...

Catenaccio! Passion! Endless tactics! Championship Manager 2: The Italian Leagues delivers Serie A drama in spreadsheet form. You may not smell the espresso or hear the vuvuzelas, ...

You thought the first one was hard? Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty laughs at your pain and then asks you to infiltrate a Gestapo HQ with a knife and a prayer. This standalone e...

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...

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,...

Chaos Overlords is a cyberpunk-themed strategy game developed by Stick Man Games and published by New World Computing in 1996. Set in a dystopian future, the game focuses on contro...