abandonware games sorted by popularity

Crystal Caves is a bright, cheerful platformer starring Mylo Steamwitz, an entrepreneur whose business plan involves raiding dangerous alien caves for profit. The levels are full o...

It’s Pac-Man, but with sunglasses. CD-Man v2.0 (1992) is a slick, souped-up clone that trades in yellow cheese for 90s attitude. Maze-chomping, ghost-dodging, and the occasio...

With Battle Isle 2200 (1994), the series goes full 3D cinematic—with cutscenes so dramatic you’d think they were auditioning for a soap opera in space. The gameplay is ...

Maniac Mansion is one of the most famous point-and-click adventure games developed by Lucasfilm Games, designed by Ron Gilbert (who later created Monkey Island) and Gary Winnick. T...

Holiday Lemmings takes the familiar chaos of tiny, clueless creatures marching toward doom and gives it a festive twist. Released in 1993, it dresses up the classic formula with ho...

The Terminator: Future Shock is an abandoned science fiction first-person shooter game based on the popular Terminator movies franchise, set in a dystopian world where machines has...

If you’ve ever thought The Lord of the Rings needed more ASCII and fewer hobbit feelings, Angband is your jam. Since 1992, this dungeon-crawling roguelike has been throwing p...

Artura is a hack-and-slash side-scroller that looks like someone tried to draw Gauntlet from memory after a power outage. You’re some kind of Celtic warrior on a mystical mis...

Sharkey’s 3D Pool (1990, DOS) delivers billiards with a dash of personality, proving that even virtual felt can have flair. The 3D perspective was impressive for its time, gi...

Rendezvous with Rama is an interactive fiction (text adventure) game released in 1984. Telarium, a subsidiary of Spinnaker Software, was known for producing narrative-driven games ...

Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur is a text adventure with occasional graphics, in which you, the not-yet-king, bumble your way through Camelot trying to prove you’re not just ...

Before Madden became a household name, 1988 gave us this DOS football classic, where plays are drawn like cave paintings and players move like molasses in January. Yet, for its tim...

Drakkhen (1989) was weird—wonderfully, gloriously weird. A 3D RPG before 3D was really ready, it let you roam a strange fantasy world full of surreal landscapes, bizarre enem...

Paperboy was one of (if not THE) arcade hit of 1985. It was developed by Atari for the arcades and later published by Mindscape for DOS in 1988. More conversion were made for quite...

Crazy Cars 2 upgrades the formula with a plot about crooked cops and stolen Ferraris. You’ll speed across vast American highways, dodging patrol cars that spawn with supernat...

Shadowcaster is a first-person action role-playing game developed by Raven Software and published by Origin Systems. It was released in 1993 for MS-DOS computers.In Shadowcaster, p...

If Tetris and a Rubik’s Cube had a weird love child, it’d be Brix. This 1992 brain-snapper is a tile-sliding puzzle game where every move counts and logic is your only ...

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to drive very fast in what looks like a PowerPoint presentation with a need for speed, 240 Racing from 1998 delivers the thrill. ...

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...

Before Doomguy started ripping and tearing, there was Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. A stealth game where sneaking is mandatory, disguises are fashionable, and stabbing Nazis is encour...

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 to the Ys series, where you swing swords by running headfirst into enemies. The Vanished Omens introduces Adol Christin, red-haired hero extraordinaire, as he embarks on a ...

Black & White (2001) is what happens when a god game gets a bit too literal. You play as a deity, complete with a giant hand, an enormous ego, and a giant pet that poops on vil...