abandonware games sorted by popularity

Mario Bros VGA is a fan made remake of the original Mario Bros by Nintendo, the game that popularized the character of Mario, the Italian plumber that first appeared in Donkey Kong...

F-15 Strike Eagle III is a combat flight simulation video game released in 1992. It was developed by MicroProse and is the third installment in the F-15 Strike Eagle series. T...

Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion turns up the difficulty (and the body count) by tossing Dave into a gothic nightmare of zombies, ghosts, and bloodthirsty critters. Armed with...

R-Type is a horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up developed and published by Irem in 1987. The game quickly gained popularity for its challenging gameplay and impressive graphics at ...

Math was never supposed to be this exciting. In Number Munchers, you’re a green blob with an appetite for multiplication tables, gobbling up correct answers while dodging &ld...

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...

The classic bomb-defusing, platform-hopping, enemy-dodging chaos of Bomb Jack gets a fresh coat of pixels in this 2002 DOS remake. You’re still the tiny superhero hopping aro...

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...

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...

There was a time when digitized sprites and surprisingly loud crowd noise felt like cutting-edge sports science, and FIFA Soccer 96 proudly lived in that moment. The big selling po...

Imagine X-COM but with fewer excuses to blame the developers when you miss a 95% chance shot—because in UFO 2000 (2004), the chaos was entirely player-driven. A free, open-so...

Comix Zone (1995, Windows XP) is what happens when a comic book artist gets pulled into his own creation and reacts by roundhouse-kicking everything in sight. Stylized to the max, ...

Welcome to the future, where space empires are managed entirely via text and colored dots. Anacreon puts you in charge of an interstellar civilization and lets you conquer galaxies...

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...

SimLife is an abandoned simulation game focused on managing a ecosystems and experimenting with genetics. SimLife was designed by Ken Karakotsios, developed and released by Maxis i...

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...

Alternate Reality: The City is a role-playing video game developed by Paradise Programming for various platforms including Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, and Commodore 64. It was released ...

Part strategy, part slapstick cartoon, North and South makes the American Civil War look like a Saturday morning show. You juggle troop movements, train robberies, and spontaneous ...

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...

Ultimate DOOM is an expanded version of the original DOOM (1993), developed by id Software and released in 1995. It includes all three original episodes of DOOM along with a brand-...

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...

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is one of the many adaptations of the Terminator franchise. This one is based on the movie of the same name, but it's not as good as the movie, according...

Supremacy: You Will Be Done (also known simply as Overlord) is a rare example of mix between real-time strategy and science fiction themed 4X game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploid, eXterm...

PGA Tour Golf is an abandoned golf game - the first in the PGA Tour series - designed by Lee Actor and Dennis Koble, developed by Sterling Silver Software and released by Electroni...

Before Battle Chess, there was Archon. Imagine a board game where pawns and knights settle disputes not with rules, but with full-on gladiatorial combat. Archon gives you light ver...

In the neon-lit corridors of cyberspace, you're a "decker," infiltrating corporate mainframes like a digital ninja. Released in 2002, this roguelike RPG offers a tile-based cyberpu...

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...