abandonware games sorted by popularity

Toonstruck is a lavishly produced adventure game built around a wonderfully strange premise: a live-action character finds himself trapped inside a cartoon world that desperately n...

Superfrog is a cheerful platform adventure starring a frog who has somehow found himself in a world filled with enemies, obstacles, coins, and enough dangerous gaps to make amphibi...

Pepper's Adventures in Time is a 1993 adventure game that sends players on a journey through history filled with puzzles, humor, and plenty of unusual situations. The story follows...

Archipelagos is like a fever dream after watching too much Myst. You’re dropped onto strange, floating islands inhabited by stone monoliths and evil terrain-infecting sludge....

SkyGlobe is an astronomy software that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was a DOS-based planetarium program that allowed users to explore the night sky in real-tim...

Ever dreamed of running a transatlantic zeppelin empire during the golden age of flight? Zeppelin: Giants of the Sky lets you do just that — and it’s every bit as niche...

Imagine Cheers met Quantum Leap and got weirdly philosophical. That’s Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, a narrative adventure based on Spider Robinson’s sci-fi stories...

In Amnesia, you wake up in a hotel room with no idea who you are, where you are, or why someone wants you dead. And no, this isn’t a gritty FPS—it’s a text advent...

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...

Dope Wars is a text-based simulation game that originated as a DOS program in the early 1980s, but gained popularity in its Windows version released in 1998. The game puts players ...

ShadowCaster is a 1993 DOS first-person action RPG that blends fantasy, exploration, and combat in a world where the player can transform into different magical creatures. Each for...

For the first time, the spotlight falls on Princess Rosella in King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella, an adventure that combines fairy tales with genuine danger. Her quest to save...

Nobunaga's Ambition is a 1988 strategy game set during Japan’s turbulent Sengoku period, when political alliances were fragile, rival clans were everywhere, and peaceful retireme...

Released in 1989, Legacy of the Ancients combines traditional role-playing mechanics with exploration, quests, and a surprisingly imaginative fantasy setting. Players recruit compa...

Microsoft Hearts is a digital adaptation of the classic trick-taking card game, and it became another famously distracting member of the Windows software family. The objective is s...

The Black Cauldron brings Disney's animated fantasy world to the computer in the form of an adventure game. Released in 1986, it follows the story and characters of the film while ...

Outcast is a 1999 science-fiction action-adventure that sends players to the alien world of Adelpha, a place where the scenery is beautiful, the inhabitants are mysterious, and the...

Released in 1992, Sextris answered a question nobody had urgently asked by combining puzzle mechanics with cheeky adult themes. Beneath the eyebrow-raising presentation lay a surpr...

The Colony is a first-person science-fiction adventure that combines exploration, combat, puzzles, and a surprisingly lonely atmosphere. Set on an alien world, it gives the player ...

Double Dragon II: The Revenge (1988) takes everything that made the first game fun and cranks it up a notch. The story begins with tragedy—Marian, the damsel from the first g...

Borland Turbo Pascal 1.0 was the first release of one of the most influential programming environments of the 1980s. It brought Pascal development to DOS in a package that was rema...

Scorched Earth (1991) was the “mother of all games” long before Doom took the title. Two or more tanks face off on a randomly generated terrain, and your only mission i...

Warlords is a fantasy strategy game that turns the world into a massive board game of conquest. You command heroes, raise armies, capture cities, and summon mythical creatures in a...

In APB (1989), you’re a cop in a little squad car with a huge attitude problem. Your job? Pull over criminals, avoid donuts, and try not to smash into every tree, wall, and p...

The 2006 DOS revival of Ghostbusters tries to bottle the movie’s charm, with proton packs, traps, and a healthy dose of spectral chaos. The graphics may not make you scream, ...

Empire Earth asks a bold question: what if we took all of human history and turned it into one very long real-time strategy match? From cavemen to mech-wielding future armies, this...

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...

The Shadows of Mordor is a dark fantasy adventure that feels like a lost chapter from an old-school Tolkien-inspired novel. You explore a grim and dangerous world filled with monst...

PHM Pegasus is a 1987 naval simulation that places players in command of a modern hydrofoil missile ship. The game focuses on controlling the vessel, managing weapons, and completi...

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...