abandonware games sorted by rating

The year is 1995, and Abuse brings us one of the slickest, darkest run-and-gun shooters ever to crawl out of a DOS/Linux/Mac basement. You play a guy in prison for a crime he didn&...

Castlevania, originally released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986, was developed and published by Konami. The game was known in Japan as Akumajo Dracula (Devil's Castl...

Nicky Boom is a 1992 platform game starring a young hero who finds himself in the traditional video game situation of having to save the day because apparently nobody else was avai...

Quest for Glory 2: Trial by Fire continues the adventures of the aspiring hero introduced in the first game, sending the player to the exotic desert land of Shapeir. Released in 19...

Wing Commander 3 takes the series into a more cinematic era, combining space combat with live-action sequences and a considerably more ambitious presentation. You once again face t...

Borland Turbo Pascal 2.0 continued the remarkably successful formula established by the original Turbo Pascal, providing DOS programmers with a fast compiler and integrated program...

DuckTales: The Quest for Gold takes everyone’s favorite miserly duck, Scrooge McDuck, and sends him globetrotting for treasure. It’s part platformer, part management si...

SimTown is a lighter and more approachable spin on the SimCity formula, concentrating on the development of a small town rather than a sprawling metropolis. Players place houses, b...

Ace of Aces (1987, DOS) is a game where you pilot a WWII plane via a series of still-image panels that suggest action more than deliver it. It’s like a flipbook with ambition...

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...

Captain Dynamo is what happens when a circus acrobat chugs ten cans of cola and decides to take on gravity itself. You’re bouncing, flipping, and springing through traps and ...

Feudal Japan gets the wargame treatment in Conquest of Japan, a strategy title that mixes historical context with tactical ambition. You manage provinces, wage war, and occasionall...

Dark Legions is a 1994 strategy gem that asks: what if Archon got a DOS makeover with bloodier battles? You command armies of fantastical creatures, from vampires to trolls, across...

Knight Orc (1987, DOS/Mac) flips the fantasy script: you’re not the hero, you’re the orc. Tired of being slaughtered by noble knights, you decide it’s payback tim...

Romantic Encounters at the Dome is a 1988 DOS title with a decidedly unusual focus, placing romance and social interaction at the center of its gameplay. Rather than commanding arm...

The last entry in Infocom’s Enchanter trilogy, Spellbreaker is where the training wheels come off. It’s unforgiving, cryptic, and expects you to understand spellcraft l...

System Shock drops you into a space station run by an AI that has clearly read too many villain manuals and decided to try them all at once. SHODAN, the game’s iconic antagon...

By 1992, The Magic Candle 3 refined everything the series had built — a deep fantasy world, intricate character management, and enough side quests to last you until retiremen...

The Settlers II: Veni, Vidi, Vici takes everything that worked in the original and polishes it until it shines like a freshly forged sword. The graphics are warmer, the maps are bi...

Hexx: Heresy of the Wizard is a curious mix of puzzle and strategy, wrapped in a fantasy setting that feels both familiar and slightly peculiar. The mechanics encourage careful pla...

Pong v.2.1 clone is a 1984 recreation of the legendary arcade game that helped start the video game industry. The concept remains wonderfully simple: two players control paddles an...

Steel Panthers 3: Brigade Command expands the series into larger-scale warfare, putting you in charge of formations where the number of units on the map can become rather intimidat...

Jumping forward to 2004, Dark Horizons Lore: Invasion ditches swords and sorcery for giant mechs stomping across futuristic battlefields. It’s a squad-based online multiplaye...

Great Naval Battles vol. 3: Fury in the Pacific expands the scope and the intensity, throwing you into larger conflicts with even more to manage. In Great Naval Battles vol. 3, the...

Heroes of the Lance takes the beloved fantasy setting and turns it into a side-scrolling adventure that is as ambitious as it is occasionally frustrating. Controlling a party of he...

Red Sky at Morning is a 1993 DOS strategy game that places players in a military setting where planning and decision-making are more important than quick reflexes. The game challen...

Ultima 2 asks the pressing question: what if you mixed time travel with fantasy and a truly mean sorceress named Minax? The answer is chaos. You’ll bounce between eras—...

Before Half-Life, there was Chasm: The Rift, a game where time-traveling mutants explode into limbs and every room looks like it was decorated by a doom-metal band. A first-person ...

HeroQuest brings the tabletop experience to the screen with a sincerity that is hard not to appreciate. It tries to recreate the feeling of gathering around a board, complete with ...

American McGee's Alice takes Lewis Carroll's Wonderland and gives it a decidedly darker makeover. Alice is no longer simply wandering through a whimsical fantasy populated by eccen...