abandonware games sorted by popularity

Back in 1990, Legend of Faerghail was what you played if you wanted a role-playing experience both grand and slightly unforgiving. A German-developed RPG, it combined dungeon crawl...

Darius Gaiden is a visually stunning side-scrolling shooter where every boss is a giant, weaponized sea creature from a neon-soaked fever dream. You’ll pilot your ship throug...

Grand Slam Bridge is exactly what it says on the tin, which is both comforting and slightly intimidating if you are not already fluent in the mysterious language of card games. In ...

Ah, Advantage Tennis—where the graphics are flat, the physics are questionable, and the grunts are blessedly absent. This DOS-era sports sim serves up matches that somehow fe...

Dangerous Streets is a fighting game that clearly wanted to be the next Street Fighter—and instead became a cult oddity. The character roster is bizarre, the animations oddly...

Now with more charts than ever! Baseball Mogul 2006 lets you relive the thrilling world of late-season trades and player salary negotiations in glorious Windows XP-era style. It&rs...

You thought running a government was hard? Try doing it with a smug civil servant and a budget crisis every five minutes. In Yes, Prime Minister, you play as Jim Hacker, the PM him...

Rendezvous with Rama is an interactive fiction (text adventure) game released in 1984. Telarium, a subsidiary of Spinnaker Software, was known for producing narrative-driven games ...

Dragon Lord (1990) is what happens when you let a fantasy novelist design a strategy game. You’re a would-be sorcerer trying to raise dragons, manage villages, and conquer la...

Sub Command is a naval warfare simulation game developed by Sonalysts Inc. and released in 2001. In Sub Command, you assume the role of a captain commanding one of three advan...

Artura is a hack-and-slash side-scroller that looks like someone tried to draw Gauntlet from memory after a power outage. You’re some kind of Celtic warrior on a mystical mis...

Released in 1993, Seven Cities of Gold (Commemorative Edition) invited players to explore the New World with a mixture of discovery, strategy and occasional greed. Sailing into unk...

Karnov is a classic side-scrolling action arcade game developed by Data East in 1987. The game features a unique protagonist named Jinborov Karnovski, or "Karnov", a fire-breathing...

Dangerous Dave: Dave Goes Nutz! is what happens when a platformer drinks too much coffee. The pace is frantic, the enemies relentless, and the levels filled with hazards that seem ...

Fievel's back, and this time it’s personal. An American Tail: Fievel Goes West lets you step into the little cowboy boots of everyone’s favorite Russian mouse as he tri...

Step into a dungeon, take a left at the creepy skeleton, and say hello to Bloodwych, the 1989 DOS game that proves co-op first-person dungeon crawling can be both confusing and odd...

Your uncle is dead, but his ghost can still blow out candles. That’s the premise. Bubble Ghost is a quirky physics puzzler where you guide a delicate bubble through haunted r...

Witchaven is an abandoned fantasy first-person shooter (or "slasher", since you'll wield melee weapons) developed by Capstone and released by IntraCorp in 1995 for DOS and Windows....

Flying Tigers (1994, DOS) throws you into the Pacific theater with a grin and a trigger finger that never quite rests. It’s loud, brash, and unashamedly action-oriented, the ...

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...

Five-a-side Indoor Soccer is what happens when football trades muddy boots for squeaky sneakers and decides walls are friends, not boundaries. Released in the mid-80s, it captures ...

Set in a post-apocalyptic world where leather vests are apparently immune to radiation, Bad Blood lets you wander the wasteland deciding whether to be a brute, a brainiac, or a mut...

In Commander Keen 5: The Armageddon Machine, Keen infiltrates a massive space station engineered to obliterate planets like it’s swatting flies. This is Keen at his most tech...