Welcome to Classic DOS Games. This is a very simple web site about a very simple time.

A long time ago, back in the 1980s and early 90s, the best games were for DOS, or a version of Windows that required DOS. Most of the best games were shareware or, more accurately, the first few levels were free and you had to pay for the rest. These were the games my friends and I spent our childhood playing, but lost track of after modern operating systems swept DOS into history.

This website is devoted to DOS and "Windows for DOS" (Win16) games. This particular DOS games site is a little more focused than most. Companies and individuals produced thousands of shareware games for DOS and, like movies and books and anything else, a lot of them weren't very good. Most sites aim for quantity. This site is almost exclusively dedicated to games that were distributed commercially, except for a select few games that were extremely good and achieved the same level of quality. Only the best games make it to this site.

This web site is unique. I am attempting to include every version of each listed game. A lot of research has gone into making sure that all of the information on this site is correct. You'll quickly notice that there is no other web site that has all of these files in one place. Classic DOS Games is quite possibly the most complete, and most accurate classic DOS games resource in the world.

The highest ideals of this site are to support the authors by providing links to their web sites and ordering information for the full versions of games that are still sold, and to encourage the authors of classic games to preserve their games for future generations by making them available for sale or as freeware. If you enjoy a shareware game, please consider buying it from the author.

All of the games on this site are freely distributable because they are shareware, freeware, or because the copyright holder has officially and legally released all rights to the public domain (abandonware).

Latest news:

3 September 2008

• Added MVP Euchre and MVP Hearts.
• There are now 700 versions of classic games on the site.

31 August 2008

• Added MVP Backgammon, MVP Spades, MVP Word Search for Windows, Rings of the Magi for Windows, and Syndicate.
• Games that support multiple native graphics modes now have a screenshot for each graphics mode.
• SVGA games are starting to be listed. Games that use standard VESA modes will be listed first, and games that rely on proprietary chipsets to achieve better-than-VGA graphics (such as MoraffWare games) will soon follow.
• Added maps and a walkthrough of Adventure 2: Savage Stones to The Adventures of MicroMan Webshrine.

21 August 2008

• Added 1993 Holiday Lemmings, Cool Spot, Disney's Aladdin, The Lion King, The Secret of Monkey Island, Spear of Destiny, and Xmas Lemmings: 1992 Holiday Edition.

7 August 2008

• Got permission from Allen Pilgrim to distribute Kiloblaster and Xargon as freeware and release the source code.
• Added Alien Breed: Tower Assault, Mega Man X, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo.
• The first batch of Classic DOS Games DVD-ROMs since JPC was added to the site has just gone out. That means it's now possible to use the DVD to play DOS games on a computer that doesn't have internet access or a hard drive (or a hard drive without a DOS emulator). As "cloud computing" becomes more popular, small notebooks with minimal hardware and small hard drives — or no hard drive at all — can be used as DOS game machines. As long as you have an optical drive and a browser, you can play DOS games even if you can't get a wireless signal — even from the dark side of the Moon! Also, the Classic DOS Games DVD-ROM has now been shipped to three continents!

2 August 2008

• Got permission from Jeff Souders to distribute Gargoyle Medieval Pack as freeware.
• Added The Color Wizard and Gargoyle Medieval Pack.
• Classic DOS Games now owns an original Dopefish mug! Apogee's Joe Siegler, who is the curator of all things related to the Dopefish, created mugs with an image of the Dopefish in 1993, and the last two that weren't given as gifts or put up for auction were recently sold on eBay, where one was purchased for our archive. See and read all about it in the forum.

23 July 2008

• Got permission from Ste Cork to distribute Overkill as freeware.
• Added In Search of Dr. Riptide.
• Made it possible to search for games by individual independent authors. Corrected and did a minor rewrite of the DOSBox Tutorial.

News Archive