abandonware games sorted by popularity

Gorillas, also known as "Gorillas.bas," is a turn-based artillery game that was included as a sample program with Microsoft QBasic, an IDE and interpreter for a variant of the...

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...

If Street Rod was a rockabilly rebel, Street Rod 2 (1991, DOS) is its cooler, leather-jacket-wearing cousin. Everything’s bigger, badder, and more polished. The cars roar wit...

Set in the D&D desert domain of Har’Akir, Ravenloft: Stone Prophet blends horror and ancient-Egypt vibes into a first-person RPG that still feels unusual today. You wande...

Forget modern physics—Caverns of Kroz lets you destroy walls with whips. Yes, whips. This 1989 ASCII masterpiece from Apogee is part puzzle, part action, and all danger. You ...

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...

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...

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...

If Doom and Gauntlet had a lovechild, Alien Breed would be the weird kid who hangs out in dark corridors with a shotgun. Released in 1993 for DOS, this top-down shooter throws you ...

Visual Basic 3 (VB3) is a programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) released by Microsoft in 1993. It is part of the Visual Basic (VB) series, which is know...

Contra: Locked and Loaded is like caffeine in video game form—fast, explosive, and just a little dangerous for your health. You’re running, you’re gunning, and yo...

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? ...

D-Fend Reloaded it's one of the most user-friendly front ends for the popular DOS-BOX emulator. The installer download includes the latest versione of DOS-BOX and is available for ...

Ultimate Soccer Manager 2 refines the original formula, adding more depth, more leagues, and a slightly more approachable interface. It still revolves around data, decisions, and d...

Step into a dungeon, take a left at the creepy skeleton, and say hello to Bloodwych, the 1989 DOS game that proves co-op first-person dungeon crawling can be both confusing and odd...

In Gazza 2, the legendary English footballer Paul Gascoigne lends his name to a soccer game that manages to be as unpredictable as his career. Released in 1991, it’s a curiou...

Pharaoh is a city-building strategy game released in 1999 by Impressions Games and published by Sierra Studios. It is set in ancient Egypt and is heavily inspired by Caesar III, an...

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...

In 1989, Deathtrack tried to answer a question nobody asked: “What if NASCAR had machine guns?” The result is a futuristic racer where speed and firepower go hand in ha...

Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion turns up the difficulty (and the body count) by tossing Dave into a gothic nightmare of zombies, ghosts, and bloodthirsty critters. Armed with...

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...

Screamer Rally (1997) took everything that made Screamer great and added dirt. Literally. The tracks are muddy, the physics bumpier, and the action even more intense. This time, it...

This sequel takes the same D&D-in-space formula and tries to go bigger, bolder, and... okay, maybe just more complicated. Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed continues the galactic strug...

Inca is a strange hybrid that feels like three different games stitched together by sheer ambition. One moment you’re managing resources and navigating an empire, the next yo...

Azalta: Cult of the Raven is what happens when a lone developer says, “I can make an RPG better than Ultima!” and sort of does. Released in 1996, this DOS dungeon crawl...