abandonware games sorted by popularity

StarCraft is a classic RTS (Real-Time Strategy) game developed by Blizzard Entertainment and released in 1998 for Windows and Macintosh. StarCraft takes the Warcraft experience to ...

Forget piracy—China Sea Trader makes hauling porcelain and spices across 19th-century Asia feel like a cutthroat business. It’s part economic sim, part geography lesson...

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...

Released in 1990, Dragon Strike dared to combine the wonder of Dungeons & Dragons with the thrill of first-person flight simulation. Yes, instead of piloting jets, you piloted ...

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to drive very fast in what looks like a PowerPoint presentation with a need for speed, 240 Racing from 1998 delivers the thrill. ...

Monuments of Mars (1991) is one of those puzzle-platformers where patience is less a virtue and more a survival tool. You’re stranded on Mars, exploring alien ruins filled wi...

Forget Rambo. Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines is what happens when you drop six experts behind Nazi lines and tell them to behave tactically… or else. Every mission is a deadl...

In Lucky Luke (1997, Windows), the fastest gun in the West is also the funniest. Based on the beloved Belgian comic, the game mixes platforming and slapstick as Luke outsmarts band...

Creatures Village trades explosions for adorable AI pets in a colorful sandbox world. You raise, teach, and care for Norns—genetically simulated cuties with personalities as ...

Karadoc’s back, and apparently inflation hit the dungeon economy hard—he wants his gold! Cadaver: The Payoff is less a sequel and more a direct continuation, like findi...

Fantasy General, released in 1996, takes the structure of classic wargames and wraps it in a richly illustrated fantasy skin. Battles are turn-based and highly tactical, emphasizin...

The Colonel's Bequest is a graphic adventure game developed and published by Sierra On-Line. It was released in 1989 for various platforms, including MS-DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST. T...

Imagine a game where minesweeper meets viral chaos—Chain Reaction (1996) isn’t quite that, but it is a fast-paced puzzle-action hybrid where things blow up in neat litt...

It’s Pac-Man, except it’s… not. Cap Man is a low-budget clone with just enough charm to avoid immediate deletion. You’ve got the dots, the ghosts, the powe...

Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight is an action-RPG and strategy game developed by Rob Anderson and published by Mindscape in 1991 for the Amiga and later for MS-DOS. The game is famous...

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...

Tank controls + polar bears + Cold War vibes = Arctic Fox. In this early vehicular combat sim, you're piloting a futuristic snow tank across an icy wasteland to stop some aliens or...

Xenon, released in 1988, was a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up video game developed by The Bitmap Brothers. Xenon was initially released for the Commodore 64, and later, it was p...

Released in 1992, Dylan Dog: Murderers brings Italy’s most famous nightmare investigator to the DOS screen with all the moody atmosphere you’d expect. It’s part p...

Marble Madness is an abandoned isometric action game designed by Mark Cerny and originally published by Atari as a successful and iconic arcade game. It was later converted for man...

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...