Surprisingly, a lot of people will pine for games of years past and assume that just because they are no longer available at retail that they are essentially gone forever or doomed to the price-gougers of the secondary market. This is not necessarily true, many developers and publishers will release their old products as Abandonware and essentially relax or completely release all of their copyrights to the game and make it available to download for free. (sometimes, they even release the source code too)
Today, I’d like to share an article I found a long time ago with a list of good sites where one can download old PC games for free, and add one of my own. The original article was found on a site I actually enjoy a lot, called Makeuseof. The article can be found here
The sites showcased in the Makeuseof article are the following:
Wikipedia’s List of Commercial Video Games Released as Freeware
As far as I can tell, all of the above sites are alive and well. But I would like to add a site to the list that I have known for a long time:
A lot of you who know about Abandonware probably know about this one, you probably also know that it was taken down recently. But I’m pleased to report that the site is being rebuilt and is slowly returning to its former glory. They don’t seem to provide direct downloads for the games anymore, but they do provide links that reliably deliver results to sites that do. If anything, check out this one for the directories and sheer information about each classic game and also to see their recommendations for games similar to those you like.
Check it out, and enjoy some of those old games!
Class dismissed!
