abandonware games sorted by popularity

Populous 2: Trials of the Olympian Gods expands the original god simulation concept by adding mythology, new powers, and even greater control over the world. Players take on the ro...

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...

Borland Turbo Pascal 3.0 was another major step in the evolution of Borland famously efficient Pascal development environment. By this point, Turbo Pascal had established a reputat...

Released in 1993 for DOS, A320 Airbus is less “Top Gun” and more “Intro to Aeronautical Bureaucracy.” It’s a flight simulator so realistic, even real ...

In the 25th century, bureaucracy is still awful—but now you also have laser guns. Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday is a surprisingly solid sci-fi RPG that blends space oper...

In Dragon’s Lair 2: Time Warp (1990), Dirk doesn’t just fight dragons—he bungles his way through time itself. Want to rescue your wife Daphne? Prepare to stumble ...

Gremlins is what happens when someone decides that cute, chaotic movie creatures should be turned into a game that is slightly less cute and a lot more confusing. In Gremlins, you ...

Toonstruck is a lavishly produced adventure game built around a wonderfully strange premise: a live-action character finds himself trapped inside a cartoon world that desperately n...

The Terminator: Rampage puts you behind the controls of a combat vehicle in a future where humanity's relationship with Skynet has gone about as badly as expected. The game combine...

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...

From 1987’s text adventure golden age, The Lurking Horror proves you don’t need graphics to be terrified. You’re a student trapped on a snowy university campus du...

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...

Ever wanted to be responsible for ending the world in fewer than ten keypresses? B-1 Nuclear Bomber (1981) gives you that chance, wrapping global annihilation in glorious monochrom...

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...

Wings of Fury is a compact aerial action game that puts you behind the controls of a fighter aircraft and wastes little time explaining why the sky is currently full of people tryi...

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...

Murders in Venice sends players into the atmospheric world of Venetian mystery, where beautiful surroundings conceal a dangerous investigation. Players explore locations, question ...

Millennia: Altered Destinies offers a fascinating blend of space exploration, strategy, and time manipulation as players attempt to guide civilizations through an enormous galactic...

Mutants! Explosions! Green slime! Bio Menace kicks off with Dr. Mangle’s Lab, a side-scrolling blast of carnage where you, Snake Logan (yes, really), shoot your way through a...

Forget Rambo. Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines is what happens when you drop six experts behind Nazi lines and tell them to behave tactically… or else. Every mission is a deadl...

Imagine Tetris but in three dimensions and your brain slowly melting into a puddle of confusion. That is Blockout. You drop 3D shapes into a pit and try to line them up, but nothin...

Based on the legendary Argentine comic, L'Eternauta: Gli Invasori della Città Eterna (1994) is bleak, atmospheric, and proudly uninterested in holding your hand. Set in a sn...

If Speedball was a fistfight on skates, Speedball 2 is a televised riot with endorsements. More teams, more power-ups, more everything. The game’s slogan might as well be &ld...

Stellar 7 takes the tank-combat formula and launches it into science fiction, giving you a futuristic armored vehicle and a whole galaxy of unpleasant things to shoot. Inspired by ...

Borland Paradox 4.5 was a powerful relational database system aimed at users who needed more than a simple spreadsheet but did not necessarily want to become full-time database eng...

William Shatner's TekWar takes the futuristic crime world of the TekWar novels and turns it into a first-person shooter filled with gunfights, technology, and suspiciously dangerou...

Inca is a strange hybrid that feels like three different games stitched together by sheer ambition. One moment you’re managing resources and navigating an empire, the next yo...

Released in 1998, Sentinel Returns revived Geoff Crammond’s peculiar classic with updated visuals and an atmosphere that felt strangely hypnotic. Players wandered surreal landsca...

Gnome Ranger feels like the kind of game that was designed by someone who really loved puzzles but maybe didn’t love explaining them. You control a gnome (clearly a recurring...

If Conan had a bad day and took it out on a few dozen goblins, you'd get something close to Axe of Rage. This 1989 DOS hack-n-slash isn't exactly subtle—you're a barbarian, t...