Games released in 1984 sorted by popularity

You are a cat. Not a cool panther or a mystical tiger. Just a good old alley cat trying to make it through a day full of brooms, angry dogs, and questionable fish. Alley Cat is a f...

King's Quest: Quest for the Crown is the first game in the popular series of King's Quest. Developed by Sierra On-line, King's Quest is an early adventure game (one of the first an...

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...

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...

Tapper is what happens when someone gamifies bartending and gives you the reflexes of a caffeinated octopus. You’re a mustachioed bartender juggling multiple counters, pourin...

Before Doom and Wolfenstein 3D turned PC gaming into a pixelated bloodbath, there was Castle Wolfenstein. A stealth game in 1984? Believe it. You sneak around a Nazi fortress, stea...

Xonix is one of those deceptively simple games that quickly becomes an obsession, tasking you with carving out sections of the screen while avoiding relentless enemies. The mechani...

Back in 1984, Devastator promised arcade-style action on DOS, which is another way of saying “prepare for blocky graphics and relentless difficulty.” It’s a shoot...

Before Battle Chess, there was Archon. Imagine a board game where pawns and knights settle disputes not with rules, but with full-on gladiatorial combat. Archon gives you light ver...

The Ancient Art of War is a classic video game that was released in the late 1980s. Developed by Evryware and published by Broderbund, it was available on various platforms, includ...

Rogue is one of the first RPGs in the history of video gaming. It's a text-based dungeon crawler in which you have to fight your way in the dungeon to recover the Amulet of Yendor....

Boulder Dash is a classic action-puzzle video game that was first released in 1984 by First Star Software. In Boulder Dash, players control a character named Rockford as he di...

Ms. Pac-Man is a classic arcade game released by Midway in 1982 (1984 for DOS) as a follow-up to the original Pac-Man (1980), developed by Namco. While its core gameplay ...

Before there was Baldur’s Gate or Skyrim, there was DND. This 1984 DOS dungeon crawler is as old-school as it gets, complete with ASCII graphics, endless hallways, and monste...

Released in 1984, Hack is one of those games that quietly shaped an entire genre while pretending not to care if you understood it or not. This early roguelike doesn’t bother...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a humorous free text adventure game based on the novel of the same name written by Douglas Adams (if you never read it, shame on you!). The ...

Back in 1984, Zaxxon was the future. Isometric graphics? Whoa. Shadow effects? Mind blown. But mostly, it was a game about flying a chunky spaceship through a heavily fortified spa...

Castle Adventure is what happens when a medieval fantasy RPG gets crammed into a game smaller than your average selfie. ASCII graphics? Check. Typing commands like “GET SWORD...

Based on a book series almost nobody remembers, Below The Root drops you into a serene world of treehouses, talking children, and deeply philosophical moral choices. Combat does no...

In Montezuma’s Revenge (1984), you play Panama Joe, an explorer who spends more time falling into pits than actually raiding temples. This early platformer is all about timin...

Q*bert is a classic arcade game that was created by Warren Davis and Jeff Lee and was released by Gottlieb in 1982. The main goal of Qbert is to change the color of every...

If you’ve ever dreamed of commanding a submarine in the middle of the Cold War but didn’t want to deal with actual torpedoes, GATO is your safe harbor. Released in 1984...

Gremlins is what happens when someone decides that cute, chaotic movie creatures should be turned into a game that is slightly less cute and a lot more confusing. In Gremlins, you ...

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a criminal economist in 1980s New York, Drug Wars has your fix—pun intended. This early DOS classic throws you into t...

Shamus is a maze action game developed by William Mataga and published by Synapse Software in 1982. The game became popular on various home computer platforms of the early 1980s. I...