abandonware games sorted by popularity

Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president? If that line doesn’t make you want to punch a ninja through a hotdog stand, nothing will. Bad Dudes VS Dragon Ninja is peak...

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...

Imagine Doom got abducted by aliens, experimented on, and sent back to Earth with a case of amnesia. That’s Alien Cabal (1997). It’s a weird mix of FPS action and X-Fil...

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...

Raiden is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up game developed by Seibu Kaihatsu and first released in arcades in 1990 and later for many home computers and consoles. Raiden fol...

From the people who brought you Dungeons & Dragons, here's Blood & Magic (1996), the RTS that nobody remembers but definitely deserves a second glance. You summon golems fr...

Rampart is what happens when someone mashes Tetris, tower defense, and medieval warfare into a single frantic loop. You rebuild crumbling castle walls using oddly shaped bricks, th...

Commander Keen 3: Keen Must Die! is the kind of title that makes you wonder what this kid did to tick off an entire alien race. After foiling their plans twice, Keen takes the figh...

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...

This one’s a flight sim for people who think Top Gun didn’t have enough fuel gauges. 1942: The Pacific Air War puts you in the cockpit of World War II fighter planes, c...

Impulse Tracker was a popular music tracker software developed by Jeffrey Lim in the late 1990s. Impulse Tracker utilized a tracker-style user interface, which was common in t...

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...

Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness is an adventure role-playing game (RPG) developed and published by Sierra On-Line. It was released in 1993 as the fourth installment in the ...

Star Goose is a classic video game developed by Logotron and released in 1988 for various home computer systems of that era, including the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and Amstra...

Flashback: The Quest for Identity feels like a playable sci-fi movie that misplaced its budget but kept its ambition. You wake up with amnesia, which is gaming shorthand for &ldquo...

Half comic book, half arcade game, Batman: The Caped Crusader (1988) offers a delightfully weird aesthetic with its paneled visual style and pulp serial vibe. You’ll punch, p...

Italian noir meets circus mystery in Yellow Kid: Giallo al Circo, where you play a journalist with a yellow trench coat and more curiosity than self-preservation. The game’s ...

Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals is a comedic adventure game developed and published by Sierra On-Line. It was released in 1989 as the t...

If you’ve ever dreamed of being a grumpy bearded guy swinging an axe and saving the world before second breakfast, Bloodstone: an Epic Dwarven Tale is your jam. Released in 1...

Before Half-Life, there was Chasm: The Rift, a game where time-traveling mutants explode into limbs and every room looks like it was decorated by a doom-metal band. A first-person ...

Arctic Adventure is the sequel nobody asked for to Pharaoh's Tomb, except this time you’re freezing your butt off. As Nevada Smith (not a typo, it’s his real name), you...

Shadowgate is an abandoned fantasy-themed adventure game developed by ICOM Simulations and released by Mindscape in 1988 for Macintosh, DOS, and also for Amiga, Apple IIgs, At...

If you’ve ever thought, “What if Pac-Man got lost in a modernist art gallery?”, then A-Maze is your oddly specific dream come true. Released in 1989 for DOS, this...

Police Quest 2: The Vengeance is a graphical point-and-click adventure game developed and published by Sierra On-Line. It was released in 1988 as the second installment in the...

In the 25th century, bureaucracy is still awful—but now you also have laser guns. Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday is a surprisingly solid sci-fi RPG that blends space oper...