abandonware games sorted by popularity

City of Lost Children is as beautiful as it is bewildering. Based on the surreal 1995 film, this adventure game drops you into a dark, oily dystopia filled with creepy orphans, biz...

Crystal Caves is a bright, cheerful platformer starring Mylo Steamwitz, an entrepreneur whose business plan involves raiding dangerous alien caves for profit. The levels are full o...

As the name suggests, EGA-Roids is a colorful take on the classic Asteroids formula, adapted for the EGA era. You pilot a ship through space, blasting rocks and dodging debris in f...

Boston Bomb Club (1991, DOS) is a Rube Goldberg fever dream disguised as a puzzle game. Your mission: guide bombs (yes, bombs) along increasingly elaborate tracks using contraption...

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...

By the time Earthworm Jim hit DOS, its reputation already preceded it, and it largely lived up to the hype. This is a platformer that thrives on absurdity: a worm in a spacesuit, b...

If your idea of excitement is waiting... and waiting... and maybe catching a giant digital tuna, Big Game Fishing is your dream come true. Simulate the thrill of casting a line wit...

If holiday cheer could be bottled into pixels, HappyLand Adventures: X-mas Edition would probably come with a candy cane aftertaste and a mild sugar rush. This cheerful platformer ...

Apollo 18: Mission to the Moon (1987) lets you relive the lunar missions in all their... spreadsheet-like glory. This game is as educational as it is punishing; you’ll learn ...

Normality is a first-person adventure video game developed by Gremlin Interactive and released in 1996. The game is set in a dystopian future where a totalitarian regime known as t...

The Lost Vale is the great “what if” of the Ultima series. Developed as an expansion to Pagan but never officially released, it became the stuff of legend. Players were...

Long before comic-book games became blockbuster spectacles, The Punisher (1990, DOS) delivered gritty vigilante action with a side of pixelated attitude. You step into Frank Castle...

As a prisoner of war, you must find a way to escape a prison in Germany in 1942. The prisoner has a daily routine which will follow if not controlled by the player for a certain am...

Pac-in-Time is an abandoned action side-scrolling platformer game developed by Kalisto Entertainment and released by Mindscape in 1993 for DOS. Pac-in-time was but also published f...

If Tetris and a Rubik’s Cube had a weird love child, it’d be Brix. This 1992 brain-snapper is a tile-sliding puzzle game where every move counts and logic is your only ...

Battlespire is the weird, dark cousin of the Elder Scrolls family - the one who shows up late to the reunion with a sword and no pants. This first-person RPG strips out all the com...

Omikron: The Nomad Soul (1999, Windows XP) is the kind of game that leans across the table and says, “What if we mashed every genre together and asked David Bowie to help?&rd...

Before rhythm games took over, there was Moonwalker (1989), where you play as none other than Michael Jackson himself, saving kidnapped kids by dancing enemies into submission. Yes...

Street Rod (1989, DOS) isn’t just a racing game—it’s a love letter to greasy hands, loud engines, and California sunsets. You start with a beat-up car and a pocke...

If you ever wanted to pilot a hovering tank while yelling at a computer screen, Nova 9 has you covered. A sequel to Stellar 7, it puts you in the cockpit against Gir Draxon’s...

Released in 1994 (long after it originally debuted on other platforms), Ant Attack! is what you get when you mix isometric graphics, giant ants, and questionable urban planning. Yo...

Dark Ages Volume III: Dungeons of Doom closes out the trilogy with—you guessed it—more doom, dungeons, and ways to fall off platforms you swear you landed on. The serie...

In Avalon (1998, DOS), you are a wizard, possibly a hero, definitely confused. This fantasy RPG drops you into a world of magic, mayhem, and menu navigation straight out of a Tolki...