abandonware games sorted by popularity

Released in 1995, Lemmings 3D boldly transported the beloved puzzle series into a fully three-dimensional world. The familiar objective remains unchanged, but rotating the camera a...

Time to hit the lanes in 10th Frame, a bowling simulator so committed to realism it even simulates the wait between turns. You line up your shot, set your spin, and pray the ancien...

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...

Conquests of the Longbow turns Robin Hood into less of a carefree swashbuckler and more of a medieval problem solver with a never-ending to-do list. Sure, you’ll shoot arrows...

Guldkorn Expressen sounds cheerful, and in many ways it is—a Scandinavian oddity that feels like it was assembled with equal parts whimsy and educational intent. You guide a ...

Back when PC shoot-’em-ups were still proving they could match arcades, Raptor: Call of the Shadows landed like a missile. Fast, crunchy, and blessed with explosions that fee...

From the dusty archives of 1995 DOS gaming comes Zorro, a side-scrolling platformer that asks the question: what if the legendary masked hero had the reflexes of a hungover sloth? ...

Released in 1988 for DOS, Star Trek: First Contact (not to be confused with the later movie) is more puzzle-solving than phaser-firing. You take control of the Enterprise crew as t...

Extreme Pinball from 1995 takes a classic pastime and injects it with a generous dose of digital attitude. This isn’t a calm, gentlemanly pinball experience—it’s ...

Westwood Studios decided to take a break from commanding and conquering to give us Nox, a fast-paced action RPG with more personality than it has any right to. You can play as a wa...

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...

Empire Deluxe is the kind of strategy game that politely pretends to be simple while quietly stealing entire weekends from your life. On the surface, it’s a turn-based war ga...

Ready to guess wildly about the cost of household objects from the comfort of a DOS screen? The Price is Right (1990, DOS) brings the TV game show to your keyboard with a mixture o...

The Fool's Errand is a puzzle-adventure computer game created by Cliff Johnson and released in 1987 for Macintosh and later for MS-DOS. The game follows the journey of a namel...

The Legend of Kyrandia: Malcolm's Revenge is the third and final installment in the Legend of Kyrandia series. This point-and-click adventure game was developed and published by We...

Shanghai II: Dragon’s Eye (1990, Windows 3.x/Mac) takes the serene logic of mahjong solitaire and wraps it in a calm, almost meditative presentation. Tiles stack in intricate...

In Captain Comic 2: Fractured Reality, our fearless spandex-wearing space explorer returns—but this time, he's bouncing between dimensions like a malfunctioning microwave. Th...

Guy Spy and the Crystals of Armageddon is gloriously over-the-top, starring a hero who looks like he walked out of a Saturday morning cartoon and into a global conspiracy. The digi...

Based loosely on Jules Verne’s famous tale, this game lets you live your steampunk submarine dreams with all the elegance of a DOS interface. You command the Nautilus, explor...

In Assault Trooper, you're the lone soldier with enough ammo to make Rambo blush, dropped behind enemy lines to shoot first and ask “was that a civilian?” later. This 1...

Imagine Tetris but in three dimensions and your brain slowly melting into a puddle of confusion. That is Blockout. You drop 3D shapes into a pit and try to line them up, but nothin...

Ikari Warriors 2: Victory Road in 1988 continued the tradition of heroic soldiers storming impossible odds while carrying enough ammunition to challenge basic physics. This sequel ...

Reach for the Stars is a 4X strategy game from before the term “4X” even existed. It’s pure, stripped-down galactic conquest: research tech, colonize worlds, and ...

In Bionic Commando, you're a soldier with no jumping ability—because who needs knees when you have a grappling arm? Swing through 1988 DOS architecture like a pixelated Tarza...

Action Soccer (1995, DOS) is what happens when you try to make a soccer game fun without worrying too much about realism, physics, or gravity. The ball bounces like it’s fill...

Norton Commander was a file manager and editor application released by Peter Norton Computing for DOS. Norton Commander used a text-based user interface with side-by-side pane...