abandonware games sorted by popularity

Amberstar is a fantasy old school RPG very similar to Ultima 6 that uses a top-down view for interiors and small locations and a first person pseudo 3D view for everything else. Un...

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...

If you like your justice loud and messy, Crime Wave delivers. It’s a side-scrolling shooter set in a dystopian future where the only way to keep order is with a hail of bulle...

Caution: subtlety not included. Blue Angel 69, released in 1989 for DOS, is basically what happens when a programmer tries to mix erotic art with a tile-based puzzle game and ends ...

MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries is a standalone expansion to MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat, released in 1996 by Activision. Part of the larger BattleTech universe, the game puts pl...

ZZT (1991, DOS) looks like it was drawn by an enthusiastic ASCII artist with too much time and not enough colors. And yet, it’s brilliant. Part action game, part puzzle adven...

By the time Ultima 9 rolled around, expectations were sky-high—and the result was… divisive. It looked gorgeous for 1999, with sweeping 3D landscapes and dramatic voic...

Alien Breed: Tower Assault (1994) takes everything you loved about the original - creepy corridors, limited ammo, sudden death - and adds something revolutionary for the time: non-...

Zany Golf is what happens when someone says, “Let’s make miniature golf, but with teleporters, hamburgers, and anti-gravity pads.” Part mini-golf simulator, part ...

In Crusader: No Regret, subtlety is left at the door. You’re a heavily armed operative on a mission to blast your way through enemy installations, leaving nothing but rubble ...

Pharaoh is a city-building strategy game released in 1999 by Impressions Games and published by Sierra Studios. It is set in ancient Egypt and is heavily inspired by Caesar III, an...

Rendezvous with Rama is an interactive fiction (text adventure) game released in 1984. Telarium, a subsidiary of Spinnaker Software, was known for producing narrative-driven games ...

Ultima 8 drops the Avatar into a grim, volcanic world where “fun” is defined as plummeting to your death from badly timed jumps. Yes, the infamous platforming mechanics...

Welcome aboard, Captain! Advanced Destroyer Simulator throws you into the high seas with all the firepower and radar beeps a '90s DOS machine can handle. Manage torpedoes, dodge de...

Great Naval Battles vol. 5: Demise of the Dreadnoughts 1914-18 is an abandoned naval simulation game, developed for DOS only by Divide by zero and released by SSI Strategic Simulat...

Alien Trilogy is a first-person shooter video game released in 1996 for various platforms, including the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and MS-DOS. Developed by Probe Entertainment and ...

Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? is an educational computer game and television game show franchise created by Broderbund. It focuses on teaching geography and history while playe...

Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor (1997, Windows XP) took the RTS formula and flipped it into a weird deathmatch where you control a single unit and try not to die... horribly. ...

Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds is a science fiction real-time strategy game set in the Star Wars universe, focused both on the first and the second Star Wars trilogy. Star Wars:...

Archon Ultra is what happens when you smash chess into an arcade cabinet and call it a day. This updated version of the original Archon throws in jazzed-up graphics and faster game...