abandonware games sorted by popularity

Released in 1993, Sexy Fighter entered the fighting genre with confidence and enough outrageous humor to make it stand apart from more serious competitors. Matches were straightfor...

Artura is a hack-and-slash side-scroller that looks like someone tried to draw Gauntlet from memory after a power outage. You’re some kind of Celtic warrior on a mystical mis...

The Bard's Tale 2: The Destiny Knight expands the original formula with a larger world, tougher enemies, new locations, and another opportunity to discover that adventuring is most...

Quattro Pro v4 is a mature DOS spreadsheet application from Borland, designed for serious number crunching and business work at a time when spreadsheets were becoming indispensable...

Fire King is a fantasy adventure that throws the player into a world of danger, exploration, and supernatural trouble. The setting has the familiar ingredients of classic computer ...

The Colonel's Bequest is a classic Sierra mystery adventure built around a suspicious mansion, a wealthy family, and enough secrets to make an ordinary dinner party look positively...

Ports of Call is a 1989 shipping simulation that puts players in charge of a maritime company where success depends on careful planning and smart decisions. Players buy ships, choo...

Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire takes the Ultima formula somewhere considerably less medieval, sending the player into a lost jungle world filled with dinosaurs, strange cultur...

Back in 1984, Zaxxon was the future. Isometric graphics? Whoa. Shadow effects? Mind blown. But mostly, it was a game about flying a chunky spaceship through a heavily fortified spa...

The Amazon Trail is an educational adventure that sends you down the Amazon River with considerably less certainty about what you are doing than the title might suggest. Released i...

Robocop 3 is a 1992 DOS action game based on the third Robocop movie, expanding the familiar formula with shooting, platforming, and vehicle-based sequences. Players control the ar...

Before Worms made artillery games cute, Bang! Bang! let you and a friend lob cartoonish shells at each other using nothing but angles, wind speed, and pure spite. It's a math lesso...

SkyGlobe is an astronomy software that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was a DOS-based planetarium program that allowed users to explore the night sky in real-tim...

Ishar 2 (1994, DOS) picks up where the first game left off, and then throws in more ways to punish careless adventurers. It’s a first-person RPG where managing your party isn...

Ah, the late '90s: when cars exploded for no reason and acronyms made everything cooler. Axelerator: Have a N.I.C.E. day! is a 1997 Windows racer that asks, “What if racing w...

Norton Utilities 8 is a substantial collection of maintenance and diagnostic tools designed to keep DOS computers healthy, organized, and recoverable. Rather than being a single ap...

It Came from the Desert is a cinematic masterpiece of giant ants, paranoia, and 1950s sci-fi homage. Released in 1990 for DOS, it blends action, strategy, and storytelling into a u...

By 1992, The Magic Candle 3 refined everything the series had built — a deep fantasy world, intricate character management, and enough side quests to last you until retiremen...

EcoQuest 2 takes its environmental message seriously but packages it in a way that’s engaging rather than preachy. You explore lush rainforest environments, solving puzzles t...

Treasure Island turns Robert Louis Stevenson's famous pirate adventure into a compact computer game, giving you the chance to chase buried treasure without having to spend several ...

Before space marines were gritty and everything exploded in brown and grey, there was The Adventures of Captain Comic. This is early PC platforming in all its clunky, jumpy, 4-colo...

Move aside, Jurassic Park—Dinopark Tycoon (1993, DOS) gave kids everywhere the chance to run their very own dinosaur zoo without the risk of being eaten alive. This education...

Battlespire is the weird, dark cousin of the Elder Scrolls family - the one who shows up late to the reunion with a sword and no pants. This first-person RPG strips out all the com...

In Gengis Khan, you’re not just playing history—you’re rewriting it with pixelated armies. This 1989 Koei classic lets you lead the great Mongol conqueror (or oth...

Strip Poker: A Sizzling Game of Chance is an early example of the adult computer-game genre, taking ordinary poker and adding a rather more provocative incentive to win. The card g...

If you ever wanted to feel like you were trapped in a washing machine armed with lasers, Descent is your game. Released in 1995, this claustrophobic, six-degrees-of-freedom shooter...

DOSBox is an open-source emulator that allows you to run software and games designed for the MS-DOS operating system on modern computers. As you probably already know, MS-DOS was a...

Borland Turbo Pascal 2.0 continued the remarkably successful formula established by the original Turbo Pascal, providing DOS programmers with a fast compiler and integrated program...

Space Hulk is a 1993 tactical game based on the Warhammer 40,000 board game, placing squads of Space Marines inside enormous abandoned spacecraft known as hulks. These dark corrido...

Released in 1996 for DOS, The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Rose Tattoo brings you back to foggy Victorian London, where murders, morphine, and moustaches abound. ...