abandonware games sorted by popularity

In Battle Chess 2: Chinese Chess (1990), the classic formula gets an eastern makeover—complete with new rules, a new board, and a fresh batch of animated fatalities. If you t...

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...

Imagine stepping into a sci-fi fever dream written during a caffeine crash, and you’ll get Bargon Attack (1992). This French point-and-click adventure is stylish, surreal, an...

A gentle adventure inspired by the animated film, Once Upon a Forest (1995, DOS) delivers an eco-friendly story wrapped in side-scrolling gameplay. You guide three tiny forest crea...

Ever dreamed of running a transatlantic zeppelin empire during the golden age of flight? Zeppelin: Giants of the Sky lets you do just that — and it’s every bit as niche...

Follow the Reader (1992, DOS) is an educational oddity that feels like a kindly librarian discovered the power of DOS and decided to make literacy a competitive sport. You guide wo...

Gal Pani X is the sort of arcade puzzle game that looks innocent for about five seconds before revealing its true nature: a frantic test of nerves where drawing lines is somehow mo...

Few games capture the feeling of “the galaxy is huge and you are spectacularly insignificant” quite like Frontier: Elite 2. Released in 1993, this ambitious sequel thro...

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom arrived in 1989 with a simple objective: survive collapsing mines, hostile cultists, and endless hazards without losing your fedora. Based on t...

By 1994, RPG fans were spoiled with titles like Might and Magic and Ultima. Then along came Disciples of Steel, a brutally complex, turn-based fantasy epic for DOS. It drops you in...

F-19 Stealth Fighter is all about sneaking in, doing your job, and getting out before anyone realizes what just happened. Instead of brute-force dogfighting, this game focuses on s...

Dragon World (1984) might sound like the precursor to a sprawling epic RPG, but it’s actually more of a board-game-style fantasy experience. Less “slay the dragon with ...

Kroz returns, and with it, your CRT monitor’s worst nightmare: ASCII graphics! Return to Kroz takes you back to a time when @ meant “you,” and everything else was...

Zeliard is a fantasy platformer/RPG hybrid that has all the trappings of a classic quest: a brave knight, an evil demon, a princess in distress, and an unreasonable number of bats....

If you’ve ever dreamed of commanding a submarine in the middle of the Cold War but didn’t want to deal with actual torpedoes, GATO is your safe harbor. Released in 1984...

Aldo’s Adventure is what you get when someone squints at Donkey Kong and decides to remake it after four cups of coffee and a long nap. You play Aldo, a brave little guy whos...

Ever wanted to pilot a walking death machine through a series of exploding industrial hellscapes while being shot at from every angle? Welcome to Amok. This 1996 mech-shooter is a ...

Galaxian is one of those early arcade classics that proved space shooters didn’t need complicated rules to be thrilling. Instead of aliens politely marching in formation, the...

Cossacks: European Wars is a real-time strategy epic that lets you command armies so big you’ll lose track of half your soldiers. Set in the 17th and 18th centuries, it&rsquo...

If Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego had a caffeinated younger cousin, it would be Bush Buck: Global Treasure Hunter. You race around the globe chasing clues, dodging rivals, a...

Before Doomguy started ripping and tearing, there was Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. A stealth game where sneaking is mandatory, disguises are fashionable, and stabbing Nazis is encour...

Borland Reflex was a relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by Borland International, a software company that was prominent in the 1980s and 1990s. Reflex was rele...

Ah, Death Knights of Krynn—a 1991 RPG where you fight hordes of undead in the Dragonlance universe. SSI’s Gold Box series wasn’t known for holding your hand, and ...