abandonware games sorted by popularity

In Space Quest 5: The Next Mutation, Roger Wilco finally receives something resembling a promotion. Released in 1993, the game puts him in charge of a spaceship and a crew, which f...

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...

Think you’re good at making tough decisions under pressure? Advanced Civilization dares you to prove it by turning diplomacy into passive-aggressive warfare. Based on the cla...

With Zork Zero, Infocom decided to throw everything into the cauldron: graphics, mouse support, and a jester who won’t shut up. A prequel to the original trilogy, it’s ...

In Battle Chess 2: Chinese Chess (1990), the classic formula gets an eastern makeover—complete with new rules, a new board, and a fresh batch of animated fatalities. If you t...

Music Time Deluxe is a Windows-era music education and composition package designed to help users explore musical notation, theory, and basic composition. Instead of treating the c...

The Mist is an atmospheric adventure built around mystery, exploration, and the unsettling idea that something is very wrong just beyond the visible horizon. The game asks the play...

Shuttle: The Space Flight Simulator is a 1992 DOS simulation that attempts to recreate the complicated business of flying the Space Shuttle. Players must deal with procedures, cont...

Remember ALF? The sarcastic alien who really had it in for cats? Well, in ALF: The First Adventure, you get to live the dream—or nightmare—of controlling the furry mena...

The Humans is a puzzle game built around a charmingly simple idea: you control a group of tiny prehistoric people and must help them reach safety by making use of their different a...

By the time Duke Nukem II rolled around, Duke had found his groove—and his ego. The gameplay is tighter, the explosions bigger, and the quips slightly more self-aware. It&rsq...

Ah, Advantage Tennis—where the graphics are flat, the physics are questionable, and the grunts are blessedly absent. This DOS-era sports sim serves up matches that somehow fe...

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...

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, ...

In Arcade Volleyball (1987), two pixelated figures smack a ball over a net with all the grace of caffeinated stick figures. It's simple, it's bizarre, and it somehow manages to be ...

Welcome aboard, Captain! Advanced Destroyer Simulator throws you into the high seas with all the firepower and radar beeps a '90s DOS machine can handle. Manage torpedoes, dodge de...

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...

Released in 1984, Jumpman is a classic platform game that challenges players to navigate construction sites packed with hazards, ladders, and carefully placed obstacles. The object...

One Must Fall: 2097 is a fighting game released in 1994 by Epic MegaGames. Set in a futuristic world, the game features giant humanoid robots known as HARs (Human-Assisted Robots) ...

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...

Sid Meier's Pirates! is one of those games that refuses to fit comfortably into a single genre. Originally released in 1987, it lets players become a pirate captain, sail the Carib...

Keef the Thief: A Boy and his Lockpick refuses to take fantasy role-playing too seriously, filling its world with eccentric characters, witty dialogue, and situations that regularl...

The Magic Candle 2 (1991, DOS) expands the world, story, and ambition of its predecessor. With forty heroes scattered across a sprawling realm, you’ll spend as much time mana...

A Line in the Sand (1992) is what happens when a board game about modern Middle Eastern warfare gets turned into a DOS strategy title with all the subtlety of a cold war memo. You ...

Mission: Impossible brings the famous spy franchise to the computer in an action-oriented adventure filled with dangerous missions, enemy agents, and situations where subtlety is g...

Stonekeep is a first-person fantasy dungeon crawler with an appropriately unpleasant central premise: the kingdom has been attacked, evil has taken over, and you are expected to cl...

Norton Commander 3 is one of the classic DOS file managers, and for many users it was the program that finally made dealing with files feel civilized. Its famous two-panel interfac...

Heart of the Maelstrom brings epic dungeon crawling to dizzying heights, challenging players with sprawling levels, fiendish enemies, and puzzles that seem to require a PhD in pati...

Set in the far-off future of 1992, Battle Chess 4000 brings space-age flair to intergalactic checkmate. Now your queen is a laser-wielding dominatrix and your pawns might be robots...

Released in 1994, Magic Carpet is one of those rare games that feels like someone mixed a fantasy novel with a flight simulator and then added enough explosions to keep everyone ha...