abandonware games sorted by popularity

Just when you thought Keen could catch a break, Commander Keen 4: Secret of the Oracle drops him into a mystical realm full of bouncing jelly beans and sentient toasters. This is w...

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...

Heart of the Maelstrom brings epic dungeon crawling to dizzying heights, challenging players with sprawling levels, fiendish enemies, and puzzles that seem to require a PhD in pati...

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 ...

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 ...

Alpha Waves is what happens when someone programs a 3D platformer using only triangles and pure imagination. You bounce. That’s it. You bounce through abstract levels that lo...

In Allan Border’s Cricket (1993), you get to live the thrill of... waiting. A lot. But when the action kicks in, it’s surprisingly engaging. Named after the Australian ...

Released in 1983, this classic arcade-style shooter has you defending humanoids from alien abductions. Fly your ship across a scrolling landscape, blasting enemies and saving innoc...

ADOM is what happens when a rogue, a wizard, and a hungry troll walk into a dungeon and never come out. Released in 1996, this roguelike classic is brutal, brilliant, and unapologe...

X-Men: Children of the Atom is a fighting video game developed by Capcom and released in arcades in 1994. The game features characters from Marvel Comics' X-Men series, including p...

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...

Cover Girl Strip Poker is exactly what the title promises—poker, but with a risqué twist. You play cards, your opponent plays coy, and the stakes are… let&rsquo...

Take everything that made Warlords 2 addictive, polish it up, throw in more content, and you get Warlords 2 Deluxe, the definitive “I’ll only play for ten minutes&rdquo...

Might and Magic 7: For Blood and Honor marks the series’ leap into full 3D exploration, and the result feels like stepping from a dusty library of spellbooks into a bustling ...

Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol is fantasy RPG game released in 1995 for Windows 3.x, but it runs flawlessy even Windows XP (see this faq if you want to play Mordor in a virtual...

With Gary Grigsby’s War in Russia, the scale somehow gets even bigger, and the margin for error even smaller. This is strategy at its most unforgiving, where moving a unit on...

Car Builder is less about speed and more about spreadsheets—just with axles. In this 1982 gem, you don’t race cars, you design them. From gear ratios to weight distribu...

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...

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...

This 1986 DOS classic sounds way cooler than it is — ACE: Air Combat Emulator promises combat, but delivers what feels like flying a lawnmower through molasses. Still, for it...

Bigger, darker, and just as merciless, Dungeon Master II: The Legend of Skullkeep doubled down on everything that made the first game great—and slightly unhinged. Released in...

If you ever wanted to run a football club without leaving your chair, The Manager (1991, DOS) delivers. This early management sim lets you buy players, balance budgets, and suffer ...

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...

Supaplex is a classic puzzle game released in 1991 by Think!Ware Development for MS-DOS and Amiga. It is heavily inspired by Boulder Dash but introduces more complex mechanics.&nbs...

Part strategy, part fantasy empire builder, Realms gives you a continent to wrangle and a surprising number of ways to embarrass yourself. You recruit armies, juggle rebellious pop...

Mines of Titan (also known as Mars Saga for other platforms) is an abandoned single-player RPG with a sci-fi setting (you're going to Mars!). Mines of Titan was developed by Westwo...

Populous 2: Trials of the Olympian Gods is a classic sandbox strategy god game. As the title suggests, its setting is loosely based on ancient Greek mythology, and you play as a de...