abandonware games sorted by popularity

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 ...

In Command Adventures: Starship (1995, DOS), you’re the captain, the admiral, and occasionally the guy who has to fix the hyperdrive when it’s on fire. This obscure gem...

Elvira: The Arcade Game trades puzzles for action and subtlety for pure chaos. This is fast, brutal, side-scrolling combat with monsters pouring in from every direction. Elvira&rsq...

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...

Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan is a computer RPG released in 1990 for MS-DOS and PC-98 platforms. It is based on the tabletop role-playing game Tunnels & Trolls crea...

Holiday World Tycoon is the sort of game that feels like it was designed after someone spent a bit too long staring at a postcard rack in an airport gift shop and thought, &ld...

Before NBA 2K made your thumbs cry, there was One-on-One Basketball. You get to control either Larry Bird or Julius Erving in a thrilling display of 80s pixelated hoop dreams. The ...

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...

In this 1990 point-and-click adventure, you find yourself in Las Vegas with no memory of how you got there. Solve puzzles, gather clues, and uncover the mystery behind your amnesia...

Don’t let the tongue-twister title fool you—Divine Divinity is a classic in the sprawling world of RPGs. Think of it as Diablo’s eccentric cousin who insists on t...

Bolo Ball is a DOS game from the mid-1990s. It features a physics-based gameplay where the objective is to knock opponent balls out of an arena. When you start the game, you find y...

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 ...

There’s something oddly hypnotic about Gapper, a game that feels like it was assembled during a coffee-fueled night by someone who really liked simple mechanics and didn&rsqu...

Crisis in the Kremlin lets you step into the shoes of a Soviet leader during the late 1980s, facing the impossible task of guiding the USSR through economic collapse, political unr...

Hugo III: Jungle of Doom is a point-and-click adventure game released in 1992. It is the third game in the Hugo adventure series, developed by David P. Gray for MS-DOS. Hugo a...

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...

As sequels go, Serpent Isle is less “more of the same” and more “everything is different, good luck.” Shipwrecked on a strange new land, you’ll deal w...

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...

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...

Imagine X-COM but with fewer excuses to blame the developers when you miss a 95% chance shot—because in UFO 2000 (2004), the chaos was entirely player-driven. A free, open-so...

Rings of Medusa is a strategy / RPG developed by the German studio Starbyte Software. It was released in 1989 for various platforms including the Commodore 64, Amiga, and MS-DOS.&n...