abandonware games sorted by popularity

Released in 1982, Deadline is one of Infocom’s classic text adventures, and it doesn’t pull punches. You’re a detective with twelve in-game hours to solve a murde...

Based on the legendary Argentine comic, L'Eternauta: Gli Invasori della Città Eterna (1994) is bleak, atmospheric, and proudly uninterested in holding your hand. Set in a sn...

X-COM: Terror from the Deep (also known as X-COM 2) is a DOS science fiction tactical strategy game and the sequel to one of the most popular DOS games in history, X-COM: UFO ...

ATAC (1992) is what you get when someone says, “What if we made SimCity, but for waging the War on Drugs?” You play as the head of an anti-narcotics task force, deployi...

Microsoft Space Simulator is a space flight simulator game developed by Bruce Artwick Organization and published by Microsoft in 1994. It is part of the broader range of simulation...

Champions of Krynn is a RPG released in 1990 by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI) and is the first game in the Dragonlance Gold Box series. It is based on the Advanced Dungeons &am...

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...

Football Manager 3 (1993, DOS) trades grass stains for spreadsheets and proves that tension can thrive in numbers. You’re not scoring goals; you’re negotiating contract...

Released in 1993 for DOS, A320 Airbus is less “Top Gun” and more “Intro to Aeronautical Bureaucracy.” It’s a flight simulator so realistic, even real ...

Take Eddie Murphy’s swagger, remove the charm, add some DOS chiptunes, and you get Beverly Hills Cop—a game adaptation that asks: “What if being a wisecracking de...

F-22 Lightning II brings the flight sim genre into the late ’90s with faster action, flashier visuals, and a jet that feels like it came straight out of a sci-fi movie. The F...

Frankenstein (1994) leans into its gothic inspiration with an earnest devotion to atmosphere. Drawing from Mary Shelley’s tale, it combines adventure elements with a somber m...

Lincity-NG is an open-source city simulation game and a continuation of the original Lincity game. The "NG" stands for "New Generation." The game is designed to be a city-building ...

Pit Fighter is an arcade-style fighting game that was originally released in arcades in 1990 by Atari Games. It was later ported to various home gaming platforms, including DOS, th...

Fable (1996) is one of those DOS curiosities that feels like it was built late at night with equal parts ambition and caffeine. It presents itself as a fantasy role-playing experie...

Before the shades, the muscles, and the one-liners, Duke Nukem was just a guy in a 2D platformer trying to save the world from an evil scientist. It’s bright, fast, and glori...