abandonware games sorted by popularity

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...

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is a 1991 mystery adventure that attempts to recreate the experience of investigating a Holmes story rather than simply watching one unfold. Pl...

Chicago, 1920s. You’ve got a tommy gun, a fedora, and a score to settle. Capone is part gangster sim, part shooting gallery, and part fever dream. The graphics are muddy, the...

Jane's Combat Simulations: Advanced Tactical Fighters arrived in 1996 and delivered the kind of detailed flight simulation that aviation enthusiasts love. Players take control of m...

SeXXcapades is an adult-oriented collection of games built around the playful, provocative style common to many early PC titles aimed at a mature audience. Rather than offering a c...

The Ball Game is a simple sports-oriented title that demonstrates how much entertainment can be squeezed from a very basic premise. Released in 1991, it focuses on ball-based gamep...

Ah, Death Knights of Krynn—a 1991 RPG where you fight hordes of undead in the Dragonlance universe. SSI’s Gold Box series wasn’t known for holding your hand, and ...

If you’ve ever dreamed of being a cop who drifts around corners at 90 mph in a convertible, Cisco Heat is your kind of chaos. This arcade racer puts you in the shoes of a law...

Streets of SimCity takes the city-building world of SimCity and drops the player directly onto its streets. Instead of calmly planning roads and zoning districts from above, you ca...

Ground Control throws you into real-time strategy without the safety net of base building, which is both refreshing and slightly terrifying. In Ground Control, every unit matters, ...

Borland Paradox 4.5 was a powerful relational database system aimed at users who needed more than a simple spreadsheet but did not necessarily want to become full-time database eng...

Before realistic fighting games, there was Boxer Rebellion—a 1982 title so primitive, it makes Pong look flashy. It’s boxing with fewer rules and more pixels per punch....

Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone (1992) is what happens when a simple beat-’em-up decides to go globetrotting. Instead of just brawling through alleys, Billy and Jimmy trav...

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 ...

Part puzzle, part platformer, part “what is even happening,” Bombuzal (1989, DOS) is a game where your job is to blow up every bomb on the screen—while not accide...

Microsoft Space Simulator is a space flight simulator game developed by Bruce Artwick Organization and published by Microsoft in 1994. It is part of the broader range of simulation...

Lancelot (1988) is an action-adventure that draws loosely from Arthurian legend and very tightly from the difficulty school of “good luck.” You guide the famous knight ...

In Dragon’s Lair 2: Time Warp (1990), Dirk doesn’t just fight dragons—he bungles his way through time itself. Want to rescue your wife Daphne? Prepare to stumble ...

Shadow Knights is a 1990 DOS action game inspired by the world of ninjas and medieval warriors. Players control a highly trained fighter who must move through dangerous environment...

Onslaught (1990, DOS) takes the classic top-down shoot-and-survive formula and injects it with an enthusiasm that borders on reckless. Hordes of enemies sprint at you like they&rsq...

The all new Family Feud brings the classic TV game show into your home, complete with survey questions and the eternal struggle to guess what other people are thinking. It’s simp...

Creatures Village trades explosions for adorable AI pets in a colorful sandbox world. You raise, teach, and care for Norns—genetically simulated cuties with personalities as ...

It’s Colonel Mustard in the Study with the Lead Pipe—but on DOS. Clue Master Detective takes the classic board game and wraps it in moody music, pixelated crime scenes,...

International Ninja Rabbits sounds like a fever dream, and in many ways it plays like one too. Released in 1991, this platformer combines martial arts, oversized vegetables, and he...

Italicized title: J-Bird. Long before endless runners and mobile time-wasters became fashionable, this quirky little game asked players to guide a determined bird through a maze-li...

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...

Fantasy General, released in 1996, takes the structure of classic wargames and wraps it in a richly illustrated fantasy skin. Battles are turn-based and highly tactical, emphasizin...

Battlecruiser 3000AD (1996) is less a game and more a test of faith. Ambitious beyond reason, it promised total control of a massive starship—crew management, planetary landi...

Loopz, released in 1990, is the kind of puzzle game that looks innocent for about five seconds before it starts humbling you. The concept is simple: connect the pieces, form loops,...

By the time Exile III: Ruined World arrived in 1997, the series knew exactly what it wanted to be—and it delivered with confidence. This installment expands the scope dramati...