abandonware games sorted by popularity

Panzer Battles is a 1990 historical strategy game that places players in command of armored forces across challenging military engagements. Every movement, attack, and defensive po...

Mech Brigade (1987) is a strategy game that lets you live out your dream of commanding an army of giant robots. Set in a futuristic battlefield, you’re in charge of deploying...

History lessons become unexpectedly adventurous in Mario's Time Machine, where Bowser has stolen priceless historical artifacts and scattered them across different eras. Players tr...

Trivial Pursuit brings the familiar board-game quiz format to the computer, replacing cardboard, tiny coloured wedges, and argumentative relatives with a keyboard and a screen. The...

Evolution is an early experiment in simulating progress, and it wears its ambition proudly. The game attempts to model development and change over time, often in abstract ways that...

Alternate Reality: The City is a role-playing video game developed by Paradise Programming for various platforms including Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, and Commodore 64. It was released ...

The original EcoQuest sets the stage for its sequel with a marine-focused adventure that blends point-and-click mechanics with environmental awareness. You play as a young protagon...

Superhero League of Hoboken is a wonderfully odd role-playing adventure that imagines a superhero team defending the world from threats while operating out of Hoboken. The humor is...

Epic (1992, DOS) lives up to its name—or at least tries very, very hard. It’s a space combat game bursting with ambition, tossing you into dogfights that feel massive e...

Released in 1989 for DOS, Baal is what happens when demons invade and the only thing standing between Earth and eternal damnation is a guy with a really big gun and absolutely no c...

By the time Ultima 9 rolled around, expectations were sky-high—and the result was… divisive. It looked gorgeous for 1999, with sweeping 3D landscapes and dramatic voic...

With a name that sounds like an interstellar pirate greeting, Spaceward Ho! is actually a strategic space colonization game, not an intergalactic dating sim. It's got a simple inte...

Renegade is a 1988 DOS beat 'em up that puts players in the role of a tough street fighter battling gangs through urban environments. The basic formula is wonderfully direct: walk ...

The Amazing Spider-Man and Captain America in Dr. Doom's Revenge! is a crossover that feels like a comic book come to life, complete with iconic heroes and a villain who clearly en...

Emperor of the Fading Suns is a grand strategy game that looks at you and assumes you’ve cleared your schedule. Politics, religion, warfare, economics—it’s all he...

Win, Lose or Draw transforms the popular drawing-and-guessing game show into a computer party game. The concept is immediately recognizable: one player gets a word or phrase and at...

Karnov is a classic side-scrolling action arcade game developed by Data East in 1987. The game features a unique protagonist named Jinborov Karnovski, or "Karnov", a fire-breathing...

Rome: Pathway to Power is a 1993 DOS adventure that places players in the world of ancient Rome, combining exploration, puzzle solving, historical atmosphere, and character interac...

In 1989, Sex Vixens from Space mixed adventure gameplay with tongue-in-cheek humor and science-fiction themes. Rather than aiming for seriousness, it embraced campy situations and ...

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is a graphic adventure game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games (now known as LucasArts). It was first released in 1988 for various p...

Imagine stepping into a sci-fi fever dream written during a caffeine crash, and you’ll get Bargon Attack (1992). This French point-and-click adventure is stylish, surreal, an...

Sam and Max Hit the Road is a 1993 adventure classic starring the freelance police duo Sam, a polite detective dog, and Max, an enthusiastic rabbit with absolutely no respect for n...

Lemmings 95, released for Windows in 1994, packages the classic puzzle experience with updated presentation while preserving everything that made the original games so addictive. H...

Imagine Doom got abducted by aliens, experimented on, and sent back to Earth with a case of amnesia. That’s Alien Cabal (1997). It’s a weird mix of FPS action and X-Fil...

Transport Tycoon Deluxe expands the original transportation-management formula with more vehicles, larger maps, additional environments, and plenty of opportunities to turn an inno...

Dungeons of Kroz 2 didn’t reinvent the wheel—it sharpened it and rolled it over your face. Released the same year as the original, it’s tougher, faster, and even ...

KGB delivers one of the most ambitious espionage adventures of the early 1990s, placing players inside a complex web of political intrigue during the final years of the Soviet Unio...

Football Fanatic (1998, DOS) is pure arcade chaos dressed in cleats. It doesn’t care much for the finer tactical nuances of the sport; it wants you sprinting, tackling, and g...

Stargunner is a 1996 side-scrolling shooter that delivers fast, colorful space combat with plenty of enemies, explosions, weapons, and screen-filling chaos. The player pilots a hea...

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...