abandonware games sorted by popularity

The Manhole: CD-ROM Masterpiece Edition (1994, Windows/Mac) is the kind of game that makes you feel like you’ve fallen into a dream. Created by the same minds behind Myst, it...

Tetris is the kind of game that looks harmless until you realize you’ve been staring at falling blocks for three hours straight. Released in 1987, this deceptively simple puzzle ...

Saddle up, pardner. Billy The Kid puts you in the dusty boots of the infamous outlaw himself. This is the Wild West, DOS-style — pixel pistols, wanted posters, and dialogue t...

The original EcoQuest sets the stage for its sequel with a marine-focused adventure that blends point-and-click mechanics with environmental awareness. You play as a young protagon...

Often regarded as the high point of the series, King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow follows Prince Alexander as he searches for Princess Cassima across the mysterious Land o...

V for Victory: Market-Garden tackles Operation Market Garden, the ambitious 1944 Allied attempt to seize a chain of bridges in the Netherlands. The game translates this complicated...

Released in 1990, Imperium offers strategy fans a chance to rule, conquer, and inevitably mismanage resources on a grand scale. It combines empire-building with military planning, ...

Udoiana Raunes is one of those late-DOS curiosities that feels like it escaped from a developer’s hard drive by accident. It presents itself as a fantasy adventure, but quick...

This 1994 naval strategy game for DOS is based on the board game of the same name, which means you’ll spend more time squinting at menus than blowing up ships. It’s cer...

Released in 1991, Les Aventures de Moktar - Vol 1: La Zoubida delivers a colorful platform adventure inspired by French comedy and packed with lively animation. Players guide Mokta...

A remake of the arcade classic, CHAMP Asteroids lets you relive the joy of spinning wildly in space and smashing rocks with a tiny triangle-shaped ship. It’s like cosmic road...

More illustrations, more intrigue, more doom. The Crystal of Doom continues the hybrid of comic-style storytelling and light role-playing with just enough choices to make you feel ...

Ever dreamed of a medieval Wall Street where knights swap swords instead of stocks? Knight Exchange turns that fever dream into pixels. Released in 1988 for DOS, this quirky strate...

Harpoon II expands on the original with more content and a greater sense of scale, as if it decided the ocean was not quite big enough the first time around. The added depth makes ...

American Conquest is the kind of game that throws hundreds of little soldiers at you and says, "Good luck, General!" Set during the early colonization of the Americas, this RTS ble...

StarBlade is a 1990 DOS space shooter built around fast action, enemy waves, and the familiar challenge of keeping a small spacecraft alive against a very large number of things tr...

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...

Released in 1986, Desert Rats is a strategy game that puts you in charge of the North African campaign of World War II. Don’t let the cute title fool you—there are no a...

O-Pong is a 1996 DOS game that takes one of the simplest ideas in video game history and gives it another spin. At its heart, it is a variation on Pong, which means two sides, a ba...

Before Doomguy started ripping and tearing, there was Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. A stealth game where sneaking is mandatory, disguises are fashionable, and stabbing Nazis is encour...

Released in 1994, Jagged Alliance helped define tactical turn-based strategy long before every game wanted to be an open-world crafting survival experience. Set on the troubled isl...

Megafortress places players inside the cockpit of a sophisticated B-52 bomber, combining realistic flight simulation with large-scale military operations. Navigation, fuel manageme...

Baseball Mogul (1997) was the original release that kicked off the whole franchise. Developed by Clay Dreslough and published by Infinite Monkey Systems, this was a pioneer in the ...

Remember ALF? The sarcastic alien who really had it in for cats? Well, in ALF: The First Adventure, you get to live the dream—or nightmare—of controlling the furry mena...

The name Carnage says it all—this top-down racer is less about precision driving and more about smashing into your enemies until they resemble digital roadkill. It’s fa...

Toonstruck is a lavishly produced adventure game built around a wonderfully strange premise: a live-action character finds himself trapped inside a cartoon world that desperately n...

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 ...

Released in 1992, Dylan Dog: Murderers brings Italy’s most famous nightmare investigator to the DOS screen with all the moody atmosphere you’d expect. It’s part p...

Telengard is one of the earliest computer role-playing games, released in 1982 for various home computers like the Commodore 64, Apple II, and TRS-80 and later for PC. It was devel...

Ford Simulator 2 (1990, DOS) refines the showroom-on-a-floppy concept with smoother presentation and a bit more driving confidence. The cars handle with reassuring steadiness, and ...