abandonware games sorted by popularity

Ever wondered what would happen if a roguelike and a B-movie had a radioactive baby? AlphaMan is the answer. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where mutant banana slugs might be your...

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...

Ugh! answers the eternal question: what if a stone-age delivery service were the basis for an entire video game? You play as a caveman whose main skills include grunting, flying a ...

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...

Back in 1987, Crazy Cars asked the eternal question: how fast can you go before the road becomes an abstract blur? Armed with a sleek sports car and the confidence of someone who&r...

By the time Premier Manager 3 rolled around, the series had cemented its reputation as the thinking fan’s football fix. Released in 1994, it refined the formula once again, o...

Ah, Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior—the game where loincloths are tiny and sword swings are deadly. This 1989 fighter slashed its way onto DOS with decapitations, grunts, and...

City of Lost Children is as beautiful as it is bewildering. Based on the surreal 1995 film, this adventure game drops you into a dark, oily dystopia filled with creepy orphans, biz...

Time travel is confusing enough, but Lost in Time (1993, DOS) makes it gloriously absurd. You wake up in a ship’s hold in the 19th century, trying to figure out how you got t...

If Tetris and a Rubik’s Cube had a weird love child, it’d be Brix. This 1992 brain-snapper is a tile-sliding puzzle game where every move counts and logic is your only ...

L'Empereur (1991) is one of those games that looks at Napoleon and says, “Yes, but what if we made it complicated?” This DOS strategy title drops you straight into the ...

Cool Spot proves that even a soft drink mascot can star in a surprisingly fun platformer. You’re a tiny, sunglasses-wearing red dot who surfs soda bubbles, rescues friends tr...

In Ante-Up at The Friday Night Poker Club, you’re not saving the world or slaying dragons — you’re just trying to win a few bucks from a room full of poker-faced ...

In Atomino (1991), you’re not blowing things up — you’re building atoms. That’s right: this puzzle game puts you in charge of creating molecular structures ...

Another World (1991) is a cinematic platformer with big ideas, minimal UI, and a shocking willingness to let you die within five seconds of starting. You play as a scientist who ge...

Space Hulk is an abandoned real-time tactical strategy game set in the Warhammer  40000 universe, developed and released by Electronic Arts in 1993 for DOS and Amiga systems. ...

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...

Elite Plus takes everything intimidating about Elite and polishes it just enough to feel slightly less hostile. The visuals are improved, the interface smoother, but the soul remai...

Taito’s Puzznic (1990) takes the idea of matching tiles and injects a surprising amount of strategy. You slide blocks to align pairs, but each move requires forethought&mdash...

Explosions? Check. Missiles? Check. Graphics that look like someone spilled gray soup on your monitor? Double check. A-10 Tank Killer lets you pilot a flying war machine and rain c...

The year is 1995, and Abuse brings us one of the slickest, darkest run-and-gun shooters ever to crawl out of a DOS/Linux/Mac basement. You play a guy in prison for a crime he didn&...

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...

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. ...

Escape from Hell asks the important question: what if escaping the underworld were less Dante and more sarcastic road trip? You descend into a demon-infested landscape armed with d...