abandonware games sorted by popularity

Jane's Combat Simulations: Advanced Tactical Fighters arrived in 1996 and delivered the kind of detailed flight simulation that aviation enthusiasts love. Players take control of m...

Gone Fishing is exactly what it sounds like, but with that peculiar late-80s DOS charm where even relaxing feels slightly stressful. You cast your line, wait patiently, and then qu...

More smoke-filled backrooms than a noir film and enough slot machines to trigger déjà vu—Caesars Palace is your low-res Vegas getaway. You're given a pile of ch...

More illustrations, more intrigue, more doom. The Crystal of Doom continues the hybrid of comic-style storytelling and light role-playing with just enough choices to make you feel ...

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...

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...

You survived Zork I, and now it’s personal. In Zork II, you face off against the enigmatic Wizard of Frobozz, who exists mostly to mess with you like a magical prankster with...

Conquest of the New World (Deluxe Edition) invites you to discover new lands, build colonies, and occasionally “accidentally” wipe out entire civilizations while smilin...

Keys to Maramon is a role-playing game developed by Mindcraft Software and released in 1990 for the Amiga, MS-DOS, and Commodore 64 platforms. The game is set in the same universe ...

With a title like Dogfight: 80 Years of Aerial Warfare, you know you’re in for a serious history lesson disguised as a game. Released in 1993, this DOS flight sim spans decad...

SimFarm is a simulation video game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts in 1993. In SimFarm, players take on the role of a farmer and manage various aspects of runni...

IVAN (Iter Vehemens ad Necem) is one of the strangest and deepest roguelikes ever created. Released in 2001, it combines brutal difficulty with extraordinary detail, from limb dama...

Iron Blood (1996, DOS) is the kind of fighting game that makes you wonder if robots really need martial arts lessons. The story is wafer-thin—something about futuristic warri...

Stormlord is an abandoned DOS platform game set in a fantasy world, developed and published by Hewson Consultants in 1989 and designed by Raffaele Cecco. There was some controversy...

Castles 2 took everything the first game did and cranked it up with actual diplomacy, espionage, and conquest mechanics. Now you’re not just stacking bricks—you’r...

Released in 1983, this is your grandpa’s Battleship—minus the plastic pegs, but with all the tension of blind naval warfare. There are no fancy graphics, no Hollywood e...

If the first game was controlled chaos, Earthworm Jim 2 is joyful anarchy. It cranks up the weirdness, throwing genre shifts and unexpected mechanics at the player with gleeful aba...

If you ever wondered what driving a luxury sports car felt like in the late 80s, Test Drive delivers that fantasy with all the pixelated swagger you could ask for. This pioneering ...

Ah yes, Air Trax from 1983 - a game where “flight” is more of a philosophical concept. It’s clunky, it's slow, and it looks like it was coded in someone’s g...

Enchanter is interactive fiction with teeth. As a text adventure, it relies entirely on imagination, yet it manages to feel richer than many graphical games of its era. You play as...

Ski or Die is a winter sports-themed video game that was originally released in 1990 for various platforms, including the Commodore 64, Amiga, and MS-DOS. The game was developed by...