abandonware games sorted by popularity

For flight simulation enthusiasts, EF 2000 was nothing short of a revelation. It offers a deep, realistic portrayal of modern air combat, complete with complex avionics and demandi...

In Teenage Queen, you step into the awkward, melodramatic shoes of a young woman navigating romance, school drama, and questionable life decisions. It feels like someone turned a s...

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...

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York expands the formula by giving you a larger playground and more opportunities to cause cartoonish chaos. Released in 1992, it follows a similar struct...

Ah, Championship Manager 93, the game that taught us yelling at pixels is a valid emotional outlet. It's you, a keyboard, and a list of players with stamina ratings. No fancy graph...

SimLife is an abandoned simulation game focused on managing a ecosystems and experimenting with genetics. SimLife was designed by Ken Karakotsios, developed and released by Maxis i...

Hook brings the world of Peter Pan into video game form, blending platforming with a light sense of adventure. Released in 1992, it captures the whimsical tone of its source materi...

Strategy fans, sharpen your wits: The Perfect General (1991, DOS) marches onto the battlefield with hex-based tactics, satisfyingly crunchy mechanics, and a strict “no button...

The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian is a title that feels like it was generated by rolling dice on a fantasy word table, and somehow that’s part of its ...

In Cosmic Soldier: Psychic War, you’re not just fighting enemies—you’re reading their minds while doing it. This RPG mixes sci-fi exploration with telepathic abil...

Hardball 3 builds on its predecessor with a noticeable sense of confidence, as if it knows it has already proven itself and now wants to show off a little. The graphics are improve...

F-19 Stealth Fighter is all about sneaking in, doing your job, and getting out before anyone realizes what just happened. Instead of brute-force dogfighting, this game focuses on s...

X-Men 2: The Fall of the Mutants is a curious blend of action and light strategy, where Marvel’s famous mutants get to stretch their powers across a series of loosely connected m...

Don’t let the clown fool you—Krusty’s Super Funhouse (1993, DOS) is more puzzle torture chamber than funhouse. You guide Krusty as he exterminates waves of rats u...

Thief: The Dark Project is a first-person stealth video game developed by Looking Glass Studios and published by Eidos Interactive. Released in 1998, it is considered a groundbreak...

Sid Meier took one look at Earth and said, “Let’s leave this dump.” Thus, Alpha Centauri (1999, Windows XP) was born - a 4X strategy game that takes Civilization ...

Ultima 2 asks the pressing question: what if you mixed time travel with fantasy and a truly mean sorceress named Minax? The answer is chaos. You’ll bounce between eras—...

Just like the movie, Batman Returns (1992) is dark, gritty, and full of dudes in clown makeup getting punched in the face. You play as the Caped Crusader in a beat-‘em-up sid...

TV Sports: Boxing takes the sweet science and wraps it in a layer of showmanship that feels straight out of a late-night sports broadcast. Released in 1991, it emphasizes spectacle...

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (1993) is a classic first-person RPG that understands pacing better than many of its peers. It offers a rich fantasy world, memorable characters,...

MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy is a science fiction role-playing game (RPG) released in 1990. The Zhodani Conspiracy is the first installment in the MegaTraveller ser...

This isn’t Disney’s musical fairytale—it’s a DOS game, which means Beauty and the Beast is way more "puzzle platformer" than "tale as old as time." You play...

Jetpack is a classic 2D platformer video game developed by Adept Software and released for MS-DOS computers in 1993. Created by Adam Pedersen, it became popular for its addictive g...