abandonware games sorted by popularity

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...

Battle Arena Toshinden was the first game in the Toshinden series and was originally released for the Sony PlayStation in 1995 and later for DOS. Battle Arena Toshinden introd...

Wolfenstein 3D: Mortal Kombat Edition combines the fast-paced first-person shooting of Wolfenstein 3D with the characters and imagery associated with Mortal Kombat, creating exactl...

Armored Fist is all about tanks. Big, heavy, no-nonsense tanks. It's essentially a driving sim for people who think speed is overrated and armor is fashion. Missions involve slow, ...

Galaxian is one of those early arcade classics that proved space shooters didn’t need complicated rules to be thrilling. Instead of aliens politely marching in formation, the...

Step into feudal Japan with Bushido, a game that tries to simulate samurai life on a machine barely capable of rendering a convincing circle. Still, there’s something charmin...

By the time Premier Manager 3 rolled around, the series had cemented its reputation as the thinking fan’s football fix. Released in 1994, it refined the formula once again, o...

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom arrived in 1989 with a simple objective: survive collapsing mines, hostile cultists, and endless hazards without losing your fedora. Based on t...

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...

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...

Forget Freddy’s razor glove for a second - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1989) for DOS is terrifying in its own way. Mostly because of the controls. You play as a teen trying to...

Sports management usually involves tactics, budgets, and serious planning. M.U.D.S. - Mean Ugly Dirty Sport decides those are merely optional suggestions. This delightfully outrage...

The year is 1995, and Abuse brings us one of the slickest, darkest run-and-gun shooters ever to crawl out of a DOS/Linux/Mac basement. You play a guy in prison for a crime he didn&...

Ugh! answers the eternal question: what if a stone-age delivery service were the basis for an entire video game? You play as a caveman whose main skills include grunting, flying a ...

Think Dungeon Master, but in space, and your party is made of four remote-controlled robot prisoners. Welcome to Captive, where the only thing more confusing than the plot is the m...

Ah, 2400 A.D. A game where you can rebel against a robot police state… by slowly walking around in beige. Released in 1988, it’s what happens when you mix Orwellian dy...

In 1983, Battlezone asked: what if vector graphics could give you war-induced vertigo? You’re in a tank, in a wireframe world, fighting other tanks. That’s it. But it&r...

Prehistorik 2 builds on the first game’s formula but smooths out the rough edges. The controls are tighter, the levels more inventive, and the humor dialed up a notch. Once a...

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 ...

Transarctica presents a wonderfully bleak vision of the future in which Earth has frozen over and surviving civilization depends on enormous trains crossing the icy wilderness. The...

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...

Xenon 2000: Project PCF is a vertical-scrolling shoot 'em up video game and originally released in 2000. It is a sequel to the earlier game "Xenon 2: Megablast," which was develope...

Borland Turbo C v2 built on the foundations of the first Turbo C release and became another popular tool for DOS programmers who wanted a fast, compact C development environment. T...

Midtown Madness turns the streets of Chicago into one enormous playground for chaotic driving, where racing is only one of several excellent excuses to ignore traffic laws. Players...

Warheads is a turn-based artillery game in the grand tradition of blowing your friends to pieces with ridiculous weapons. You control a team of tiny, heavily armed soldiers and tak...

Exile: Escape from the Pit, released in 1995, is where the whole strange, subterranean saga begins. You’re exiled—literally—thrown into an underground world and t...

If Clouds of Xeen was the sunny side of the adventure, Might and Magic 5: Darkside of Xeen gleefully flips the map over and shows you the other half. The tone is a bit darker, the ...

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 ...

Body Blows is a 2D fighting game developed and published by Team17, released in 1993. It was initially launched for the Amiga and later ported to MS-DOS. Body Blows was one of the ...

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 ...