abandonware games sorted by popularity

Wizardry 4: The Return of Werdna flips the script by letting you play the villain, which is as delightful as it is diabolical. You control Werdna, an evil wizard with a knack for c...

Released in 1989 for DOS and Mac, The Transinium Challenge is a classic TNG-era adventure game with a wholesome dose of techno-babble. You guide Picard and the crew through an inve...

By the time Space Quest 3: The Pirates of Pestulon arrived in 1989, Roger Wilco had become something of a professional survivor. This time he starts the game stranded in a garbage ...

Part strategy, part fantasy empire builder, Realms gives you a continent to wrangle and a surprising number of ways to embarrass yourself. You recruit armies, juggle rebellious pop...

Fallout 2 takes everything that worked in the original and gleefully pushes it further, louder, and weirder. Released in 1998, it expands the world, the humor, and the sheer number...

It’s Colonel Mustard in the Study with the Lead Pipe—but on DOS. Clue Master Detective takes the classic board game and wraps it in moody music, pixelated crime scenes,...

Pirates! Gold is an open world game designed by Paul Murphy, developed and released by MicroProse Software in 1993 for DOS, Windows 3.x, Mac and also Sega Genesis and Amiga CD32.&n...

Hardball 4 arrives with the kind of confidence that suggests it has been paying attention to feedback, and it shows. The game offers more options, better visuals, and a deeper sens...

Before Wake of the Ravager, there was Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, the first CRPG to bring Athas to life. It was a bold departure from the usual Gold Box formula, with more freedom i...

Castles is what happens when SimCity meets Game of Thrones. You design your own fortress, manage the budget, and tell unruly peasants why the walls are more important than food. Be...

Free Enterprise from 1996 is business simulation with a distinctly ’90s sense of ambition. You’re tasked with building and managing a corporate empire, juggling finance...

Blasteroids is a video game developed and released by Atari, Inc. in 1987. It's a sequel to the classic arcade game Asteroids, which was released in 1979. In Blasteroids, players c...

Welcome to the squared circle of wireframe pain. Released in 1991 for DOS, this game puts you in the gloves of a boxer rendered entirely out of jagged geometry. The animation was r...

Released in 2000, Dark Reign 2 took the futuristic RTS series into full 3D territory. While other games were content with flashy visuals, this one focused on tactical depth and res...

In Commander Keen 2: The Earth Explodes, the stakes go from “oops, stranded on Mars” to “uh-oh, Earth is doomed.” The Vorticons have planted death lasers in...

Borland Reflex was a relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by Borland International, a software company that was prominent in the 1980s and 1990s. Reflex was rele...

Speedball is like hockey, but with more metal, more violence, and fewer rules. It’s future-sport brutality where scoring goals is optional—knocking opponents unconsciou...

Dig Dug is a classic maze arcade action game that was first released by Namco in 1982 as a coin-op and later for a number of other systems. The gameplay of Dig Dug involves digging...

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...

Fascination, released in 1991 for DOS, is a point-and-click adventure that clearly wanted to be edgy, mysterious, and just a little bit scandalous. Set in a neon-soaked future full...

Heroes of the 357th puts you in the cockpit with a seriousness that borders on intimidating, but in a good way. It leans heavily into simulation, asking you to think like a pilot r...

Cool Spot proves that even a soft drink mascot can star in a surprisingly fun platformer. You’re a tiny, sunglasses-wearing red dot who surfs soda bubbles, rescues friends tr...