Playing Old PC Games for Free

If there’s one thing that never fails to make me experience some nostalgia, it’s either playing classic games, or reading about them. I pretty much grew up on the PC, with my first “real” PC (meaning one that didn’t break) being a 286. From there, we kept upgrading and played the games that came along with them. Perhaps you were in a similar situation, and even if not, if you played games from the late 70’s, 80s and even 90s, you no doubt would have a blast revisiting them.

Believe it or not, a lot of older games have been decommissioned, meaning, they’ve essentially become freed from the developer and publisher and became public domain (with some rules in place, usually, such as the request to not reverse engineer). That means, there may very-well be many games you played years and years ago that are now completely free, ready to be downloaded.

“Abandonware” is so popular, in fact, that there exist many sites dedicated to it, and many have hundreds upon hundreds of games for download. One of my favorite such sites is Abandonia, and while they say they are dedicated to classic DOS games, you’ll find some Windows titles as well.

So what games can be found there? In a quick look, I see Abuse, Alien Carnage (pictured below), Blackthorne, Blood, Cannon Fodder, Descent, Ghosts ‘N Goblins, The Goonies, Grand Theft Auto, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Ken’s Labyrinth, Raptor, Skyroads, System Shock… and so much more. And this is just one site! If it’s missing what you’re looking for, it might still be out there.

The site was founded in 1999, when the concept of abandonware was merely two years old. After a few inactive years, it was and has continued to blossom, with new ‘abandoned’ games added nearly every day. At the time of writing, the Abandonia database hosts 1,063 downloadable games and counts a total of more than 100.000 members.