abandonware games sorted by popularity

Dungeon Keeper 2 took everything its predecessor did and gave it a demonic polish. Slicker graphics, full 3D environments, and imps that finally looked like they deserved a raise. ...

3-Demon from 1983 is basically Pac-Man with a taste for LSD. You’re in a first-person maze, munching dots while glowing ghosts try to ruin your day. It’s surprisingly c...

Artura is a hack-and-slash side-scroller that looks like someone tried to draw Gauntlet from memory after a power outage. You’re some kind of Celtic warrior on a mystical mis...

Premier Manager 2 polished the formula, giving football nerds even more stats to obsess over. If you thought juggling line-ups and balancing books was fun in the first game, this s...

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...

Released in 1991, Fantasy World Dizzy is a whimsical adventure that proves even an egg can carry the weight of an entire fantasy quest. The game blends puzzle-solving with explorat...

Executive Suite puts you in the shoes of a corporate leader and asks you to juggle ambition, ethics, and profit, usually with conflicting results. It’s a business simulation ...

Wipeout is a popular racing video game known for its high-speed gameplay, anti-gravity racing vehicles, and electronic music soundtracks. Wipeout was developed and published b...

What if ants could use bazookas and beetles had battle plans? Battle Bugs answers this crucial question by turning your screen into a war zone where tiny insects wage strategic war...

Double Dragon II: The Revenge (1988) takes everything that made the first game fun and cranks it up a notch. The story begins with tragedy—Marian, the damsel from the first g...

F-15 Strike Eagle is one of those games that practically defined what a combat flight simulator should be in the 1980s. It drops you into the cockpit of the legendary F-15 and tell...

In Airball (1987), you don’t play a knight, a space marine, or a plumber - you play a literal ball of air. Trapped in an isometric nightmare of spikes, fans, and poison gas, ...

If you’ve ever thought, “What if Pac-Man got lost in a modernist art gallery?”, then A-Maze is your oddly specific dream come true. Released in 1989 for DOS, this...

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...

Imagine Cheers met Quantum Leap and got weirdly philosophical. That’s Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, a narrative adventure based on Spider Robinson’s sci-fi stories...

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....

Pools of Darkness is a computer role-playing game (CRPG) developed and published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI). It is the fourth entry in the "Gold Box" series of Dungeons &...

This isn’t Disney’s musical fairytale—it’s a DOS game, which means Beauty and the Beast is way more "puzzle platformer" than "tale as old as time." You play...

Ishar 2 (1994, DOS) picks up where the first game left off, and then throws in more ways to punish careless adventurers. It’s a first-person RPG where managing your party isn...

Often hailed as the best of the trilogy, Star Trail doubles down on everything its predecessor attempted—and somehow makes it all smoother. The world feels richer, the quests...

By 1994, point-and-click adventures were everywhere, but Dragonsphere carved out its niche with lush graphics, an intriguing plot, and plenty of puzzles. You play a young king task...

By the time Alone in the Dark 3 (1994, DOS) rolls around, Edward Carnby has seen it all - so now it’s off to the Wild West, because of course it is. Zombies? Check. Cowboys? ...

Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur is a text adventure with occasional graphics, in which you, the not-yet-king, bumble your way through Camelot trying to prove you’re not just ...

A text adventure with just enough graphics to remind you what year it is, The Pawn (1986, DOS) wraps you in a fantasy world where the puzzles are clever and the parser occasionally...