Abandonware games beginning with letter Z

Z is a real-time strategy game developed by The Bitmap Brothers and originally released in 1996 for MS-DOS. It's known for its fast-paced gameplay, humorous style, and distinctive art design.In Z, players control a robot army across various battlefields, aiming to conquer territories and defeat enemy forces. The game features a tongue-in-cheek narr...

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is a graphic adventure game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games (now known as LucasArts). It was first released in 1988 for various platforms, including the Commodore 64, MS-DOS, Amiga, and others.The game follows the adventures of Zak McKracken, a tabloid newspaper reporter, as he uncovers a plot by a...

Zangband is a variant of the popular roguelike game Angband. Zangband, short for Zelazny Angband, was developed by Chris Weisiger and first released in 1994. The game features a fantasy world with diverse races, classes, and monsters. Players explore dungeons, caves, and other environments in a quest to reach the bottom level of the dungeon, d...

Zany Golf (also known as Will Harvey's Zany Golf) is an abandoned miniature golf game designed by Will Harvey, developed by Sandcastle and released by Electronic Arts in 1988. Zany Golf runs on DOS but was also published for Amiga, Atari ST, Apple IIgs, Genesis. Zany Golf can be played by two players on hotseat mode.

Zaxxon is a classic arcade video game that was first released by Sega in 1982 for the arcades and later for a number of platforms. It is considered one of the pioneering titles in the shoot 'em up or scrolling shooter genre. Zaxxon was notable for its use of isometric graphics, which gave the game a unique 3D perspective.

Zeitgeist, also known as Jupiter Strike in North America, is a 3D space shooter developed by Taito and published by Acclaim Entertainment. It was released for the PlayStation and Windows in 1996. Zeitgeist is a rail shooter: the player controls a spaceship that moves along a fixed path, with limited control over the ship's movement within...

Zeliard is a fantasy platformer - JRPG hybrid with metroidvania gameplay elements developed by Game Arts and released for DOS in 1990. Zeliard is a single-player game.

Zool was to Amiga what Sonic was for Sega consoles: a cool protagonist (a ninja of the Nth dimension!) for a high adrenaline action platformer. Zool was designed by George Allen and published by Gremlin in 1992 and it was an instant success. It was ported for many platforms, DOS included, and followed by Zool 2 in 1993.

Zork is one of the most popular text-adventures and one of the first interactive fiction games ever created. The first Zork was developed in the seventies and ported on various platform by Infocom in the early 80s. Infocom was one of the most prolific developers of text-adventures for home computers and created memorable interactive fiction ga...

Released in 1995 for DOS, Zorlim's Arcade Volleyball is what happens when someone decides regular volleyball isn’t chaotic enough. Picture stick figures with the agility of caffeinated spiders and a physics engine that took the day off. It’s fast, frantic, and occasionally feels like you're trying to swat a fly with a pool noodle. The A...

From the dusty archives of 1995 DOS gaming comes Zorro, a side-scrolling platformer that asks the question: what if the legendary masked hero had the reflexes of a hungover sloth? With clunky controls and combat that’s more slapstick than swashbuckling, it’s a charmingly awkward tribute to the classic character. You’ll leap, climb...

Zyclunt is a side-scrolling action game developed and published by Phantagram in 1995. The game is set in a dystopian future where incurable diseases and a rise in criminal activities have brought society to the brink of collapse. In this setting, advanced genetic engineering has led to the creation of cybernetic organisms, or cyborgs, which have b...

Imagine Tetris went on a sugar binge and had an identity crisis. That’s Zyconix (1992, DOS) in a nutshell. It’s a tile-matching puzzle game where nothing quite behaves how you expect it to, and that’s half the fun. Blocks come in weird shapes, fall in strange ways, and the rules are just shy of being written in invisible ink. But ...

Released in 1984, Zyll is what happens when a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master learns to code and decides to build a text adventure inside a coffee machine. There are no graphics - just glorious walls of text - but boy, is it atmospheric. You’re on a quest to recover your kingdom’s stolen power (of course), but with multiple paths,...

ZZT (1991, DOS) looks like it was drawn by an enthusiastic ASCII artist with too much time and not enough colors. And yet, it’s brilliant. Part action game, part puzzle adventure, part game creation tool, ZZT is the reason some people grew up to become game developers instead of astronauts. Built by a teenage Tim Sweeney (yes, the Unreal Engi...