abandonware games sorted by popularity

In Curse of Enchantia, a young boy is whisked away to a magical world full of bizarre creatures, tricky puzzles, and an alarming number of ways to die. The game’s whimsical a...

Released in 1988, Alien Fires 2199 AD looks and plays like someone tried to translate a fever dream into a sci-fi RPG. You control some dude with a chin of steel and a crew that se...

Released in 1995, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is the cheerful little tale of humanity being tortured by an all-powerful AI for eternity. In other words, not exactly a feel-g...

Dungeon Hack is a dungeon-crawling role-playing game (RPG) developed by DreamForge Intertainment and published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI). It was released in 1993 for MS-...

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 ...

Scorched Earth (1991) was the “mother of all games” long before Doom took the title. Two or more tanks face off on a randomly generated terrain, and your only mission i...

Alien Legacy (1994) is like SimCity crashed into Star Trek and nobody called the insurance company. It’s a real-time strategy/simulation game that has you managing a colony i...

Astro Fire (1994) is the illegitimate love child of Asteroids and a particularly angry fireworks show. You pilot a tiny ship with a death wish through an endless barrage of asteroi...

Imagine Marble Madness had a caffeine overdose and fell into a platformer. That’s Bumpy’s Arcade Fantasy. You control a perpetually bouncing ball named Bumpy (creative,...

X-COM: Terror from the Deep (also known as X-COM 2) is a DOS science fiction tactical strategy game and the sequel to one of the most popular DOS games in history, X-COM: UFO ...

Released in 1990, Sex Olympics embraced absurdity with enough enthusiasm to make players wonder what exactly inspired its creators. Built around humorous adult themes, the game rel...

Great Naval Battles vol. 5: Demise of the Dreadnoughts takes you back even further, exploring naval warfare at a time when technology and tactics were evolving rapidly. In Great Na...

SimEarth is a simulation in which you can shape and mold a planet in almost every way you can imagine. In SimEarth our planet is simulated as a whole: life, climate, atmosphere are...

If you like your RPGs verbose, Betrayal at Krondor is basically a fantasy novel you play. Set in Raymond E. Feist’s Midkemia, the game oozes with narrative depth, detailed ch...

Step into the polygonal shoes of Edward Carnby (or Emily Hartwood, if you're feeling bold) in Alone in the Dark, the grandfather of survival horror games. Released in 1992 for DOS,...

Few games capture the feeling of “the galaxy is huge and you are spectacularly insignificant” quite like Frontier: Elite 2. Released in 1993, this ambitious sequel thro...

Ultimate Soccer Manager 2 refines the original formula, adding more depth, more leagues, and a slightly more approachable interface. It still revolves around data, decisions, and d...

ARJ is a file compression utility and file format created by Robert K. Jung. The name "ARJ" stands for "Archived by Robert Jung." It was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s a...

Shadowgate (1988, DOS/Windows 3.x/Mac) is a point-and-click adventure that politely invites you into a castle and then gleefully kills you for touching the wrong thing. Armed with ...

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...

Adventure Game Studio (AGS) is a software development tool that enables users to create point-and-click adventure games. It was originally created by Chris Jones and has been used ...

Big Red Racing is what happens when you combine arcade mayhem with zero regard for realism and lots of British sarcasm. Drive everything from dump trucks to hovercrafts, insult you...

Might and Magic: Swords of Xeen is something of a curious side chapter in the Xeen saga, originally created as a smaller adventure but still packed with the series’ trademark...