abandonware games sorted by popularity

Released in 1984, Hack is one of those games that quietly shaped an entire genre while pretending not to care if you understood it or not. This early roguelike doesn’t bother...

Monopoly Deluxe is an abandoned turn-based top-down Monopoly adaptation  of the classic board game, developed by Parker Brothers and released by Virgin Interactive in 1992. Mo...

The Cycles: International Grand Prix Racing is a motorcycle racing simulation game developed and published by Accolade in 1989. The game is part of the wave of realistic racing sim...

A Dudley Dilemma (1988) sounds like the title of a children’s book, but it’s actually a very British text adventure for DOS where the stakes are politely quirky and mil...

Life & Death is a medical simulation game developed by Software Toolworks and released in 1988 for MS-DOS computers. It aimed to provide players with a realistic simulation of ...

Impulse Tracker was a popular music tracker software developed by Jeffrey Lim in the late 1990s. Impulse Tracker utilized a tracker-style user interface, which was common in t...

Arctic Adventure is the sequel nobody asked for to Pharaoh's Tomb, except this time you’re freezing your butt off. As Nevada Smith (not a typo, it’s his real name), you...

Rick Dangerous 2 is a clear example of a sequel done right. Developed by Core Design and released in 1990 on a plethora of platforms, Rick Dangerous 2 is a classic platform game wi...

Heimdall blends action and strategy in a way that feels ambitious, placing you in a mythological setting where decisions matter as much as reflexes. Managing resources, recruiting ...

Blood Money (1990) answers the question: what if every level in a shoot-'em-up was a different kind of sci-fi fever dream? You fly through alien-infested caverns, collect cash, and...

In Altered Destiny, a perfectly average guy named P.J. Barrett gets sucked into a bizarre alien dimension because he answered a phone call. Seriously. What follows is a classic poi...

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...

Turbo Pascal 7 (TP7) is a programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was developed by Borland as an ev...

If Street Rod was a rockabilly rebel, Street Rod 2 (1991, DOS) is its cooler, leather-jacket-wearing cousin. Everything’s bigger, badder, and more polished. The cars roar wit...

Microsoft Decathlon was a popular sports video game released by Microsoft in 1980. It was one of the earliest sports simulation games, notable for its variety of events and competi...

This sequel takes the same D&D-in-space formula and tries to go bigger, bolder, and... okay, maybe just more complicated. Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed continues the galactic strug...

Amerzone is like stepping into a dream where logic is optional and atmosphere is everything. You play a journalist unraveling the mystery of a dying explorer’s last journey, ...

If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to run a railway empire without getting coal dust all over your clothes, Railroad Tycoon is the place to start. This 1990 classic h...