abandonware games sorted by popularity

Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire is the second installment in Sierra On-Line's Quest for Glory series, blending classic adventure gameplay with RPG elements in a world inspired by...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

Shadow President is a geopolitical simulation video game developed by DC True in 1993 for MS-DOS. In Shadow President, players take on the role of the President of the United State...

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...

Hook brings the world of Peter Pan into video game form, blending platforming with a light sense of adventure. Released in 1992, it captures the whimsical tone of its source materi...

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...

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...

Before space marines were gritty and everything exploded in brown and grey, there was The Adventures of Captain Comic. This is early PC platforming in all its clunky, jumpy, 4-colo...

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...

Skifree is an adorable downhill romp… at least until the monster shows up. You start by zipping peacefully through flags and jumps, enjoying the zen simplicity of early Wind...

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...

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...

Before there was Capitalism 2, there was Capitalism Plus, which basically took the original and added a few bells, whistles, and ways to fail spectacularly. It’s like being h...

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...

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...

Back in 1992, The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel set the bar for pixelated deduction. A famous actress is dead, and every gentleman in London seems...

Grand Prix Circuit is a fascinating early attempt at turning real-world racing into something playable without requiring a steering wheel the size of your desk. In Grand Prix Circu...

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...

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...

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...

Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 (MSFS 4.0) is a flight simulation game released by Microsoft in 1989 for MS-DOS. It was the fourth major version of the Microsoft Flight Simulator se...

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...

Gremlins 2: The New Batch leans into the chaos of its source material and then adds a layer of video game unpredictability on top. In Gremlins 2, you deal with enemies that are as ...

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, ...