abandonware games sorted by popularity

Blades of Steel is hockey the way it was meant to be. Fast, brutal, and occasionally resembling a bar fight on ice. The game lets you punch other players mid-match and the announce...

Ever wanted to manage a kingdom, lead armies, go dungeon-crawling, and attend budget meetings? Birthright: The Gorgon’s Alliance makes all your fantasy micromanagement dreams...

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...

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, ...

Xenon, released in 1988, was a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up video game developed by The Bitmap Brothers. Xenon was initially released for the Commodore 64, and later, it was p...

Imagine Doom got abducted by aliens, experimented on, and sent back to Earth with a case of amnesia. That’s Alien Cabal (1997). It’s a weird mix of FPS action and X-Fil...

Before Half-Life, there was Chasm: The Rift, a game where time-traveling mutants explode into limbs and every room looks like it was decorated by a doom-metal band. A first-person ...

Released in 1987, this is less of a simulator and more of a fever dream where you pilot a flying box over a grid pretending to be terrain. 3-D Helicopter Simulator was ambitious fo...

Monkey Island 2 is the second game of the Monkey Island series, a point and click adventure game set in a world of pirates and mysterious treasures. Monkey Island 2 utilizes a comm...

The Cycles: International Grand Prix Racing is a motorcycle racing simulation game developed and published by Accolade in 1989. The game is part of the wave of realistic racing sim...

Karadoc’s back, and apparently inflation hit the dungeon economy hard—he wants his gold! Cadaver: The Payoff is less a sequel and more a direct continuation, like findi...

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...

Commander Keen 1: Marooned on Mars is a platform video game developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software in 1990 as shareware for MS-DOS. The game follows the adv...

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. ...

Cyberpunk meets click-and-point in Computer Underground, a game that looks like it was programmed in someone's garage—and probably was. You’re a hacker navigating a pix...

Before immersive sims were a buzzword, there was Ultima Underworld. Dropping you into a massive first-person dungeon, it gave players freedom unthinkable at the time. Want to negot...

Ever wondered what would happen if The Phantom of the Opera got his hands on a time machine, a vengeful streak, and a point-and-click interface? In Return of the Phantom, you step ...

System Shock 2 is a first-person action role-playing video game developed by Irrational Games and Looking Glass Studios. It was released in 1999 and is known for its innovative gam...

Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor (1997, Windows XP) took the RTS formula and flipped it into a weird deathmatch where you control a single unit and try not to die... horribly. ...

Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel is a tactical role-playing game published by Interplay Entertainment in 2001. Unlike its predecessors, which were traditional RPGs with turn-b...

Arctic Adventure is the sequel nobody asked for to Pharaoh's Tomb, except this time you’re freezing your butt off. As Nevada Smith (not a typo, it’s his real name), you...

Set in a foggy, postcard-perfect version of the British capital, Eagle Eye Mysteries in London takes the educational detective formula and gives it a polite accent. You play a youn...

The original Crusader: No Remorse sets the tone for the series: brutal, explosive, and unapologetically action-focused. You’re a rogue operative taking on a dystopian corpora...