abandonware games sorted by popularity

Football fans eager to relive one of Manchester United's greatest achievements found plenty to enjoy in Manchester United: The Double. Combining management elements with on-pitch a...

If text adventures are your thing, Star Trek: The Kobayashi Alternative (1985, DOS) will either delight or destroy you. You type commands to guide Kirk and crew through a no-win sc...

Before Titanic was a movie with a lot of weeping, there was Beyond the Titanic, a text adventure where surviving the iceberg is just the beginning. The game takes the historic disa...

Subwar 2050 takes submarine warfare into a futuristic setting, replacing conventional naval combat with sleek vessels, hostile waters, and enough advanced technology to make a peri...

Shadow of Yserbius is a 1993 online role-playing game set in a fantasy world filled with dungeons, monsters, treasure, and enough corridors to make a cartographer nervous. Players ...

Mortville Manor is a classic adventure game built around a mysterious mansion, strange events, and the sort of atmosphere that makes exploring abandoned buildings seem like a terri...

Based on the fantasy novels by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Death Gate (1994) throws you into an epic, puzzle-heavy adventure. Imagine Myst, but with more dragons and a script ...

Before the shades, the muscles, and the one-liners, Duke Nukem was just a guy in a 2D platformer trying to save the world from an evil scientist. It’s bright, fast, and glori...

ELIZA, created in the mid-1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, was one of the first computer programs to simulate human conversation. Designed as a natural language processing demons...

Archipelagos is like a fever dream after watching too much Myst. You’re dropped onto strange, floating islands inhabited by stone monoliths and evil terrain-infecting sludge....

Sports games from the late 1980s often relied on imagination as much as graphics, and Magic Johnson's Basketball is no exception. Featuring the NBA legend himself, it delivers fast...

A martial arts tournament starring fluffy animals with serious anger issues? Yes, please. Brutal: Paws of Fury is what happens when someone watches too much kung fu cinema and then...

In Extremis from 1993 is one of those lesser-known titles that surprises players with its ambition. Mixing action and strategy, it places you in dangerous situations where quick th...

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...

From the mind of Michael Crichton comes Amazon, a game that lets you live out your jungle explorer fantasies—without the bugs or dysentery. You’re off to the Amazon to ...

Objection! is a 1992 DOS game built around the dramatic world of courtroom arguments, legal reasoning, and the thrilling possibility that one badly chosen sentence can ruin your en...

Ikari III: The Rescue takes the military action of its predecessors and adds one crucial ingredient: punching. Released in 1990 for DOS, it shifts from run-and-gun chaos toward bea...

Educational games often struggle to balance learning with entertainment, but Mario is Missing! takes an unusual approach by sending Luigi around the world to rescue his famous brot...

In 1986, Hacker arrived with a premise that felt thrillingly dangerous at the time: you, alone, tapping into secret computer systems and uncovering conspiracies. No explosions, no ...

Released in 1992, Locomotion challenges players with increasingly complex railway-themed puzzles that require careful planning and impeccable timing. Guiding trains safely across i...

In this 1992 DOS RPG, you play as an agent of the Faunus Foundation, protecting the world from cosmic horrors. Set in 1921, the game combines detective work with Lovecraftian eleme...

Published in 1988, Lombard RAC Rally captures the demanding world of rally racing with challenging courses, changing terrain, and an emphasis on precision driving. Unlike tradition...

Ultimate Body Blows is a fighting game that boldly enters a genre dominated by arcade giants and says, “We can do this on a PC keyboard.” Inspired heavily by Street Fig...

No, it’s not about a guy who holds your groceries. Bagman is a retro-style indie throwback where you’re a pickaxe-wielding convict trying to steal bags of cash from a m...

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 ...