abandonware games sorted by popularity

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...

Anvil of Dawn is what happens when 1995 tries to reinvent the fantasy RPG and ends up creating something strangely beautiful. It’s first-person, it’s real-time, and it&...

Welcome to the future, where space empires are managed entirely via text and colored dots. Anacreon puts you in charge of an interstellar civilization and lets you conquer galaxies...

Ultima 8 drops the Avatar into a grim, volcanic world where “fun” is defined as plummeting to your death from badly timed jumps. Yes, the infamous platforming mechanics...

In Atomino (1991), you’re not blowing things up — you’re building atoms. That’s right: this puzzle game puts you in charge of creating molecular structures ...

Skate or Die is the embodiment of late-’80s “cool,” complete with neon chaos, absurdly dangerous skate events, and characters who look like they stepped out of a ...

NetHack is an open-source roguelike game that's been around since the early 1980s. It's a single-player dungeon exploration game where you navigate your character through a randoml...

In Blitzkrieg: Battle at the Ardennes, you’re not just playing a wargame — you’re being handed a clipboard, a stack of orders, and a freezing cold battlefield in ...

Screamer (1995) was the moment when PC gamers realized DOS could, in fact, go fast. A blistering arcade racer inspired by Daytona USA, it delivered glossy graphics, roaring engines...

Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans is one of gaming’s most famous “what could have been” stories. Designed as a point-and-click adventure set in the Warcraft ...

The Blues Brothers 2: Jukebox Adventure is a video game developed by Titus Interactive and released in 1993. It is a sequel to the original The Blues Brothers game, which was based...

Back in 1999, Warzone 2100 felt like a glimpse into the future of strategy gaming. Forget endless waves of faceless soldiers; here you could actually design your own tanks and chop...

Amberstar is a fantasy old school RPG very similar to Ultima 6 that uses a top-down view for interiors and small locations and a first person pseudo 3D view for everything else. Un...

If you’ve ever looked at Tetris and thought, “This needs to be in 3D and way harder,” then BlockOut 2 (2000) is your kind of punishment. This brain-melter takes f...

Flight of the Amazon Queen is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Interactive Binary Illusions and originally released in 1995. The game is heavily inspired by the likes ...

For flight simulation enthusiasts, EF 2000 was nothing short of a revelation. It offers a deep, realistic portrayal of modern air combat, complete with complex avionics and demandi...

Alien Legacy (1994) is like SimCity crashed into Star Trek and nobody called the insurance company. It’s a real-time strategy/simulation game that has you managing a colony i...

In Altered Destiny, a perfectly average guy named P.J. Barrett gets sucked into a bizarre alien dimension because he answered a phone call. Seriously. What follows is a classic poi...

Set in a foggy, postcard-perfect version of the British capital, Eagle Eye Mysteries in London takes the educational detective formula and gives it a polite accent. You play a youn...

First Samurai is a classic action-platformer game originally released in 1991. The game was initially available on the Amiga and Atari ST, with later ports to the Commodore 64, DOS...

Hacker 2: The Doomsday Papers doubles down on everything the original attempted, raising the stakes from “interesting breach of security” to “global catastrophe.&...