abandonware games sorted by popularity

Football Manager 3 (1993, DOS) trades grass stains for spreadsheets and proves that tension can thrive in numbers. You’re not scoring goals; you’re negotiating contract...

Star Trek: Starfleet Command (1999, Windows XP) is a dream come true for anyone who memorized warp core schematics. It’s a tactical space combat simulator that rewards patien...

X-COM: Terror from the Deep (also known as X-COM 2) is a DOS science fiction tactical strategy game and the sequel to one of the most popular DOS games in history, X-COM: UFO ...

By 1996, Street Fighter 2: Championship Edition on DOS felt like the veteran fighter returning for one last round. You could finally play as the bosses, which was a childhood dream...

Released in 2000, Dark Reign 2 took the futuristic RTS series into full 3D territory. While other games were content with flashy visuals, this one focused on tactical depth and res...

Keys to Maramon is a role-playing game developed by Mindcraft Software and released in 1990 for the Amiga, MS-DOS, and Commodore 64 platforms. The game is set in the same universe ...

ELIZA, created in the mid-1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, was one of the first computer programs to simulate human conversation. Designed as a natural language processing demons...

Released in 1997, Extreme Assault is a bold and ambitious hybrid that blends flight simulation with ground combat in a futuristic setting. You pilot advanced military hardware acro...

In Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, Sierra took the Wild West and decided it needed more jokes, more puns, and significantly more medical malpractice. Released in 1993, this po...

Before heroes had inventory screens and voice acting, there was Adventure in Serenia, the lovechild of a text parser and a fever dream. Released in 1982, this proto-graphic adventu...

Magic Carpet is an action shooter game set in a fictional Middle East developed by Bullfrog and released by Electronic Arts in 1994 for DOS and Macintosh. Your goal is to fly aroun...

With Gary Grigsby’s War in Russia, the scale somehow gets even bigger, and the margin for error even smaller. This is strategy at its most unforgiving, where moving a unit on...

War in Middle-earth is a real-time strategy game developed by Synergistic Software and published by Melbourne House. It was released in 1988 for various platforms including the Com...

You are Sherlock Holmes, and someone has committed a crime, possibly because they couldn’t handle the game’s UI. 221B Baker Street is a detective board game where your ...

In Jimmy Connors Pro Tennis Tour, tennis is stripped down to its essentials: a racket, a ball, and the growing suspicion that your opponent has somehow mastered the laws of physics...

Electroman is a cheerful little platformer with a big grin and zero interest in realism. You play as a cartoonish superhero zipping through levels full of gadgets, traps, and enemi...

By the time Exile III: Ruined World arrived in 1997, the series knew exactly what it wanted to be—and it delivered with confidence. This installment expands the scope dramati...

Netscape Navigator was one of the earliest web browsers that played a crucial role in popularizing the World Wide Web. It was developed by Netscape Communications Corporation and r...

Amberstar is a fantasy old school RPG very similar to Ultima 6 that uses a top-down view for interiors and small locations and a first person pseudo 3D view for everything else. Un...

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...