abandonware games sorted by popularity

Premier Manager 2 polished the formula, giving football nerds even more stats to obsess over. If you thought juggling line-ups and balancing books was fun in the first game, this s...

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:...

Before Football Manager consumed the souls of soccer nerds everywhere, there was Club Football: The Manager. It’s all spreadsheets, transfers, and managing egos with egos. Th...

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...

BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge is a turn-based strategy game developed by Westwood Associates and published by Infocom in 1990. It is the sequel to "Crescent Hawk's I...

Ah, Budokan, the game where patience and discipline meet awkwardly slow combat and the occasional flying kick. You play as a martial arts student training in various dojos, culmina...

It Came from the Desert is an abandonware action-adventure game developed by Cinemaware and released in 1990 for PC (DOS) and Amiga. It Came From the Desert is an action-adventure ...

Magic Pockets is a platform game developed by The Bitmap Brothers and published by Renegade Software. It was released in 1991 for the Atari ST, Amiga, and MS-DOS platforms. In...

Before Indiana Jones had a whip, Chagunitzu had block puzzles. Released in 1990 by Softdisk (and developed by a young John Romero), this game is a precursor to God of Thunder and p...

Alternate Reality: The City is a role-playing video game developed by Paradise Programming for various platforms including Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, and Commodore 64. It was released ...

By 1996, Street Fighter 2: Championship Edition on DOS felt like the veteran fighter returning for one last round. You could finally play as the bosses, which was a childhood dream...

Rome: Pathway to Power (also known as Rome AD 92) is an abandoned isometric adventure game with strategy elements set in ancient Rome. Rome was developed by Millennium Interactive ...

Ardentryst is the indie platformer that tried really hard to be a Metroidvania and kinda pulled it off. With anime-style art, RPG elements, and two playable characters, it’s ...

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 ...

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...

Inner Worlds is the kind of side-scroller that sneaks up on you. At first, it’s a fantasy action-platformer—monsters, dungeons, the usual—but then you discover th...

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...

Champions of Krynn is a RPG released in 1990 by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI) and is the first game in the Dragonlance Gold Box series. It is based on the Advanced Dungeons &am...

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&...

If Star Trek: 25th Anniversary isn’t on your DOS nostalgia list, fix that now. Released in 1992, it’s a point-and-click adventure that actually feels like classic Star ...

Before there was Baldur’s Gate or Skyrim, there was DND. This 1984 DOS dungeon crawler is as old-school as it gets, complete with ASCII graphics, endless hallways, and monste...

By the time Alone in the Dark 3 (1994, DOS) rolls around, Edward Carnby has seen it all - so now it’s off to the Wild West, because of course it is. Zombies? Check. Cowboys? ...

Ever wonder what it’s like to be a grave-robbing dwarf with a flair for interior dungeon decoration? Cadaver grants that peculiar wish. As Karadoc, you’ll wander an eer...

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...

In Ambush at Sorinor, tactics meet fantasy in a land where ambushing people is apparently the national sport. You’re a mercenary commander picking the right team to win missi...