abandonware games sorted by popularity

WordStar 4 was a popular word processing software program during the early days of personal computing. WordStar 4 included features typical of word processors in that era, all...

SimCity 2000 is a classic city building simulation, part of the popular SimCity series, developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. SimCity 2000 is a huge step up from the 2D p...

QBasic, or QuickBASIC, was an interpreted version of the BASIC programming language developed by Microsoft. It was designed to be easy to learn and use, making it accessible to beg...

Gunship 2000 takes the foundation of its predecessor and adds polish, options, and a broader strategic scope. You’re not just flying missions; you’re shaping campaigns,...

Beneath a Steel Sky is a classic point-and-click adventure game released in 1994, developed by Revolution Software. Set in a dystopian, cyberpunk future, the game is renowned for i...

Quake is a first-person shooter (FPS) video game developed by id Software and released in 1996. It is the successor to id Software's immensely popular "Doom" series and is known fo...

Don’t let the pixelated graphics and cheerful music fool you—Chip’s Challenge is a gauntlet of logical torment. You play as Chip, a nerdy teen who agrees to navig...

Board game night went digital in 1998 with Axis and Allies, a strategy title that lets you rewrite WWII—assuming you don’t forget where you left your infantry. Fans of ...

In Syndicate, you don’t just play the bad guy—you manage a full corporate evil empire, complete with mind-controlled agents in trench coats and a suspicious lack of HR ...

By the time Lords of Midnight: The Citadel arrived in 1995, it carried the weight of a classic on its shoulders. Rather than reinventing the original, it refines and reinterprets i...

Hospital management has never been so weirdly German. In Biing!, you hire nurses based on looks, run a completely dysfunctional clinic, and try not to get arrested. It's part strat...

Sokoban is a classic puzzle game first released in 1982 by Hiroyuki Imabayashi for the NEC PC-8801 in Japan and later ported to a number of platforms, including DOS, as Soko-Ban. T...

In Might and Magic 2: Gates to Another World, the designers apparently decided that the best way to reward players for finishing the first game was to throw them into a world that ...

If arcades had a heartbeat in the mid-90s, Daytona USA (1994) was it. This racing game was Sega’s love letter to neon lights, loud engines, and steering wheels that rattled l...

Might and Magic Book One: Secret of the Inner Sanctum is the place where the whole saga begins, and it proudly carries the wild ambition of early computer RPGs. The land of Varn is...

Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon, also released in 1991, takes everything that worked in the original and expands it thoughtfully. The dungeon design is more varied, ...

Lemmings is a classic puzzle-platformer video game developed by DMA Design (now known as Rockstar North) and published by Psygnosis. It was originally released in 1991 for the Amig...

Castlevania, originally released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986, was developed and published by Konami. The game was known in Japan as Akumajo Dracula (Devil's Castl...

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone brings the wizarding world to life with a mix of exploration, puzzles, and light action that feels appropriately magical. It captures the sens...

Here’s where Duke goes full legend. Duke Nukem 3D isn’t just a shooter; it’s a cultural moment. The game exploded onto DOS with outrageous humor, interactive envi...

The proto-fighting game that walked so Street Fighter could punch. Yie Ar Kung Fu is pure arcade joy: a brave martial artist named Oolong fights a rogue’s gallery of opponent...

dBASE III is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that was popular in the late 1980s. It was developed by Ashton-Tate, a software company. dBASE III was a successor to t...

Albion is a science fiction role-playing game (RPG) developed and published by German studio Blue Byte Software. It was released in 1995 for MS-DOS and later for Amiga. Albion...

Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure is a platform video game that was originally released in 1994. It is a sequel to the classic 1982 game Pitfall! but features updated graphics and gamep...

LadyLove (1990) is infamous, misunderstood, and often misremembered. Marketed as erotic, it’s actually a text-heavy life simulation about relationships, choices, and social n...

Heroes of Might and Magic offers a strategic playground where armies march, heroes grow stronger, and time seems to disappear without warning. It has that classic “just one more ...