Abandonware games

Abandonware is the name the retro scene coined in the late 1990s for software whose owner has stopped selling and supporting it. The word describes a situation, not a licence — an abandoned game is still under copyright, and much of what circulates under the label sits in a legal grey zone. This collection deliberately takes the narrow cut: it gathers the famous names of the abandonware scene whose licence in our catalogue is recorded as free or shareware, so every title here may be distributed because a licence says so, not merely because its publisher went silent.

The shareware half of the list is the legacy of Apogee and id Software. Their model split a game into episodes, gave the first one away and sold the rest by mail order — and the free episode was not a demo but a complete game you were encouraged to copy. That is how Wolfenstein 3D spread in 1992, how Doom conquered offices a year later, and how the Commander Keen episodes travelled from floppy to floppy. Duke Nukem 3D, Raptor and Terminal Velocity rode the same distribution machine, and copying a shareware episode was legal then and remains legal now.

The freeware half consists of games their owners later released outright. Epic gave away One Must Fall 2097 and Tyrian 2000, Remedy freed its debut racer Death Rally, Revolution released Beneath a Steel Sky and Lure of the Temptress for free distribution, and Origin gave away Ultima IV. Alongside them stand games that never cost anything: the worm duel Liero, the magazine type-in Arcade Volleyball, the little Czech railway simulator Vlak, and Supaplex, whose authors released it themselves years after its commercial run.

Everything in this collection is listed with the licence our catalogue records for it, and anything without a documented free or shareware licence stays out — how we approach abandonware and copyright in general is explained on the page Is it legal?.

Playable titles come first in the list and run directly in the browser through an emulator, with no installation and no registration. The rest of the collection is catalogued with release year, developer and licence on each game page, and a physical keyboard makes the DOS-era titles far more comfortable.