The best DOS games, ranked by the people who play them.

Right now, by the community ranking on this page: Grand Theft Auto, Sid Meier's Civilization, DOOM II: Hell on Earth, Grand Theft Auto (mp), Jazz Jackrabbit, Command & Conquer, Z and Owl Fly II. That order is computed from member reviews and real play activity, so it moves whenever members rate a title or play one — it is not an editor's list of favourites.

Doom (1993), by a distance. Its shareware episode reached more PCs than any other DOS title. Sierra's King's Quest series, the SimCity and SimEarth line, Prince of Persia and the LucasArts adventures (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max) were the other household names.

For this archive, any title that shipped natively for MS-DOS between 1981 and 1999. Early hybrid DOS/Windows games count when the DOS build is the canonical one. Windows-only releases don't, however much they look the part.

Titles marked playable here run in the browser on DOSBox-X compiled to WebAssembly, with nothing to install or configure. The rest carry full metadata while the preservation queue prepares a build, and requesting a title pushes it up that queue. To play locally instead, DOSBox, DOSBox-X and DOSBox Staging are the standard emulators on Windows, macOS and Linux, and GOG sells many of the bigger names with DOSBox already configured.

Not natively. 64-bit Windows dropped the NTVDM compatibility layer that DOS programs relied on. The answer is the same as on any other modern system: run DOSBox-X locally, or open the title here and play it in the browser. Either way you get working CPU, sound, video and keyboard mapping without changing anything on the host.

MS-DOS shipped with IBM PCs in 1981, and the first commercial games arrived alongside it: Microsoft Adventure, DONKEY.BAS and the early IBM-branded ports of arcade titles. Most of them are catalogued here under the 1981–84 era.

It depends on who holds the rights. Some publishers re-release DOS games as freeware or sell them on GOG, including Bethesda with the id Software titles, Apogee and 3D Realms with their back catalog, and Activision with Sierra. Others walked away from the code without ever releasing it, which is where the term 'abandonware' comes from. We list titles whose status the community has documented, and a request from a current rights-holder always wins.

DOSBox is an open-source emulator that recreates an early-90s PC: CPU, EGA/VGA, Sound Blaster, AdLib and the rest. It's how most people play DOS games on modern hardware. You don't need to install it to use this site, because DOSBox-X is compiled to WebAssembly and runs in your browser tab. For playing offline on your own machine, the standalone installers are still the way to go.

An informal term for commercial software whose rights-holder no longer sells or supports it. It's still copyrighted, but in practice much of it can't be bought anywhere. The DOS catalog is full of such titles, which is a large part of why archives like this one exist.

Tight scope, sharp design, and shareware distribution that put complete games in front of millions of players. Most genres still selling on Steam were invented or perfected during the DOS era, from FPS and RTS to point-and-click, isometric RPG, city sim and space sim, and plenty of the originals hold up better than their late-90s successors.

It is a single rating out of five, and it is the number the list is sorted by. It starts from the average of every published member review on that title, is pulled toward the archive's own catalogue score while the review count is still small, and is then nudged by up to half a star according to how much the title is actually played here. Nothing on the list is placed by hand.