abandonware games sorted by popularity

The Cycles is a motorcycle racing game that focuses on the speed, danger, and slightly terrifying sensation of throwing a bike around a track at considerable velocity. The player r...

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...

Gunship is a landmark helicopter simulation that treats you less like a player and more like a trainee pilot who forgot to read the manual. It demands attention to instrumentation,...

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...

Night Shift is a 1990 action game with a wonderfully unusual premise: instead of saving the world, the player is busy working a night shift. Naturally, this is not an ordinary job,...

Alien Legacy (1994) is like SimCity crashed into Star Trek and nobody called the insurance company. It’s a real-time strategy/simulation game that has you managing a colony i...

F-22 Lightning II brings the flight sim genre into the late ’90s with faster action, flashier visuals, and a jet that feels like it came straight out of a sci-fi movie. The F...

VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet software for personal computers, and it played a pivotal role in the early history of personal computing. It was developed by Dan Bricklin and Bo...

Ninja Rabbits is a 1992 platform game that takes the concept of the ninja and adds a rabbit, because apparently the genre had not yet reached its full potential for unusual protago...

Quake II is a first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and released in 1997. It is the sequel to the original Quake and was a significant milestone in the evolution...

Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol is a deep dungeon-crawling role-playing game designed for players who enjoy building powerful characters one dangerous expedition at a time. The under...

Hardball 4 arrives with the kind of confidence that suggests it has been paying attention to feedback, and it shows. The game offers more options, better visuals, and a deeper sens...

Step into Crazy Nick’s Leisure Suit Larry Casino and leave your wallet safe—only your pride is at stake here. Larry Laffer, king of questionable fashion, hosts a digita...

King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder represented a major leap forward for Sierra, introducing hand-painted visuals, a point-and-click interface, and full voice acting ...

Operation Stealth is a 1990 adventure game that combines international intrigue, espionage, and the sort of dangerous missions where the protagonist probably should have taken a qu...

The ninja ant is back—and this time, he brought a friend. Zool 2 doubles down on the sugar-fueled mayhem of the first game with more levels, more enemies, and even more inexp...

Transport Tycoon is one of the great classic transportation management games, turning the seemingly simple task of moving things from A to B into an obsession with timetables, rout...

In Montezuma’s Revenge (1984), you play Panama Joe, an explorer who spends more time falling into pits than actually raiding temples. This early platformer is all about timin...

The Ultimate Doom expands the classic demon-blasting formula with an additional episode and plenty more reasons to wonder why opening that suspicious door seemed like a good idea. ...

Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer's Appliance is an adventure game released in 1991, developed by Steve Meretzky and published by Legend Entertainment. It’s the second installme...

It’s 1990, and you’re sitting at your DOS PC playing Accordion, a game that somehow turns solitaire into something slower and more passive-aggressive. It’s not fl...

Alien Attack wastes little time explaining that Earth is having a very bad day. The premise is exactly the sort of thing science-fiction games love: hostile aliens have arrived, an...

Zeliard is a fantasy platformer/RPG hybrid that has all the trappings of a classic quest: a brave knight, an evil demon, a princess in distress, and an unreasonable number of bats....

Neuromancer is a 1989 adventure game inspired by William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel, and it takes players into a world of hackers, corporations, artificial intelligence, cyberspace...

Ultima 5 takes a darker turn. Lord British is missing, and his regent, Lord Blackthorn, has turned Britannia into a police state where virtues are enforced at sword-point. You know...

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...

Flight of the Amazon Queen is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Interactive Binary Illusions and originally released in 1995. The game is heavily inspired by the likes ...

Super ZZT expands the classic ZZT concept into a larger adventure and creation toolkit, giving players worlds to explore as well as tools with which to build their own. The game co...

RollerCoaster Tycoon is a 1999 theme-park management simulation that lets players design, build, and operate their own amusement parks. Players construct roller coasters, attractio...

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...