abandonware games sorted by popularity

Italicized title: Jack Nicklaus Golf & Course Design: Signature Edition. This expanded golf simulation delivers exactly what fans of the sport might hope for: realistic gamepla...

In Commander Keen 5: The Armageddon Machine, Keen infiltrates a massive space station engineered to obliterate planets like it’s swatting flies. This is Keen at his most tech...

In Chicago 90, you either play as the cops or the crooks in a top-down, crime-infested, vaguely Windy City-esque setting. Think of it as a proto-GTA with more sirens and fewer mora...

You don’t need to hate spiders to fear Arachnophobia (1991), but it helps. Based on the movie of the same name, it tasks you with exterminating wave after wave of creepy craw...

Turns out war is a lot tidier when it’s turn-based. Battle Isle (1991) gives you neat little hexagons to move your units on, like a very angry board game. It’s got stra...

In Annals of Rome, you don’t just play history — you command it, badly. This 1988 strategy title lets you take control of the Roman Empire and try to keep it from falli...

In Ack-Ack Attack! (1995, DOS), you operate an anti-aircraft gun and do your best to shoot down waves of enemy planes with what appears to be a potato cannon. The game is loud, fra...

The original Crusader: No Remorse sets the tone for the series: brutal, explosive, and unapologetically action-focused. You’re a rogue operative taking on a dystopian corpora...

War never changes—but it does get oddly cute in Cannon Fodder. Guide your tiny commandos through missions filled with explosions, carnage, and dark humor. The game mixes arca...

Black Monday (1987) combines economic panic with the thrill of—wait for it—spreadsheet navigation. It's like Wolf of Wall Street without the fun, drugs, or DiCaprio. Yo...

Cyberpunk meets click-and-point in Computer Underground, a game that looks like it was programmed in someone's garage—and probably was. You’re a hacker navigating a pix...

Slipstream 5000 is a futuristic racing video game that was released in 1995 for MS-DOS. It was developed by The Software Refinery and published by Gremlin Interactive. The game is ...

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...

Motorcycle racing has never looked so… polygonal. Team Suzuki puts you in the leather suit of a professional racer hurtling around pixel-perfect tracks. The controls are twi...

The Dig is a point-and-click adventure game developed and published by LucasArts. It was originally released in 1995 for MS-DOS and later for other platforms, including Mac OS and ...

In Taipan for Windows, you’re not a hero, you’re a 19th-century capitalist trying to get rich trading tea, silk, and the occasional bit of opium in the South China Sea....

In Diggers 2: Extractors, released in 1995, the digging franchise doubled down on strategy while adding a dash of science fiction flair. This time, your miners aren’t just bu...

Italicized title: Jack in the Dark. Released as a small holiday-themed adventure, this game serves as a charming introduction to the style later made famous by Alone in the Dark. P...

If you’ve ever looked at a cave and thought, “Yes, this is where I’ll build my empire,” then Cave Wars is your jam. Released in 1996, this strategy game thr...

Deadly Racer is basically what happens when someone at the office said, “What if racing, but everyone might die?” Released in 1994 for DOS, it’s a fast-paced, rou...

Before Michael Bay got his hands on the franchise, Autobots (1989, DOS) offered a more... subtle approach to transforming robot mayhem. Well, not subtle exactly — more like c...

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...

If you've ever stared at a camel and thought, "What if it shot lasers and had a personal grudge against humanity?", Attack of the Mutant Camels is the fever dream you've been waiti...

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...

Welcome to Tass Times in Tonetown, where the ‘80s collided with science fiction and nobody cleaned up the mess. It’s a bizarre adventure full of punk hairdos, neon colo...

Independence War takes space combat seriously, almost stubbornly so. Instead of arcade-style dogfights, it presents a Newtonian flight model where momentum, inertia, and positionin...