abandonware games sorted by popularity

Alien Syndrome (1989) is a top-down shooter where you save hostages, shoot aliens, and scream internally because you’re always out of time. It’s frantic arcade action a...

You thought running a government was hard? Try doing it with a smug civil servant and a budget crisis every five minutes. In Yes, Prime Minister, you play as Jim Hacker, the PM him...

Ah, Dungeons of Kroz, the glorious mess of ASCII characters that somehow became addictive. Created by Apogee in 1989, it’s a fast-paced dungeon adventure where every symbol m...

A direct sequel to Deathwatch, Ancients 2: Approaching Evil is like returning to your childhood neighborhood, except everyone’s still trying to kill you. Released in 1994, it...

Strap in and crawl through the mud - Airborne Ranger (1988) is here to chew bubblegum and infiltrate enemy lines. And it's all out of bubblegum. This tactical action game lets you ...

In Sito Pons 500cc Grand Prix, you’re tossed straight onto the track with the grace of a rookie who definitely didn’t read the manual. The game tries hard to recreate t...

The sequel nobody expected but everyone button-mashed through. Yie Ar Kung Fu 2 adds more characters, more chaos, and less coherence. This time you’re Lee (no relation to Bru...

If adrenaline-fueled car chases aren’t your thing, maybe meticulous Civil War simulations are. Decision at Gettysburg (1990) is a detailed, turn-based strategy game that lets...

Frederik Pohl’s Gateway is science fiction that doesn’t hold your hand—or particularly care if you survive. Based on Pohl’s novel, this 1992 adventure drops...

La Abadía del Crimen (1987) is famously unforgiving, and it knows it. Inspired by Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, this is an isometric adventure where breaking the...

From the people who brought you Dungeons & Dragons, here's Blood & Magic (1996), the RTS that nobody remembers but definitely deserves a second glance. You summon golems fr...

Arnie 2 is the unofficial Schwarzenegger sim where you run around shirtless with guns bigger than your torso, blowing up helicopters, bunkers, and bad guys in increasingly ridiculo...

Crisis in the Kremlin lets you step into the shoes of a Soviet leader during the late 1980s, facing the impossible task of guiding the USSR through economic collapse, political unr...

Elvira: The Arcade Game trades puzzles for action and subtlety for pure chaos. This is fast, brutal, side-scrolling combat with monsters pouring in from every direction. Elvira&rsq...

Space Rogue is what happens when Elite and Ultima decide to have a baby… in space. You’re dumped into a universe of hostile aliens, smugglers, and zero-g dogfights, an...

GW-BASIC (short for Gee Whiz BASIC) is a dialect of the BASIC programming language that was developed by Microsoft. It's one of the early implementations of BASIC and was included ...

Turbo Assembler and Tools 5.0, often referred to as TASM, is an x86 assembler for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. As a key component of Borland's suite of development tools...

Screamer Rally (1997) took everything that made Screamer great and added dirt. Literally. The tracks are muddy, the physics bumpier, and the action even more intense. This time, it...