All the best DOS games,ranked by the community.

By community rating, the top of the catalog leans on the same names that defined the era: Doom, Warcraft II, X-COM: UFO Defense, Civilization, Heroes of Might & Magic II, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Master of Magic, and Monkey Island. The exact order on this page is whatever the catalog's current ratings show — it shifts as members add reviews and votes, not on an editor's schedule.

By shareware reach alone, Doom (1993) eclipses everything else — id Software's shareware episode hit more PCs than any other DOS title. Sierra's King's Quest series, the SimCity / SimEarth line, Prince of Persia and the LucasArts adventures (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max) were the other household-name DOS games of the era.

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. Pure Windows-only releases — even when they look the part — don't.

Titles on dos.games that carry a Playable badge run straight in the browser via DOSBox-X compiled to WebAssembly — no install, no DOSBox configuration, no abandonware hunt. The rest of the catalog has full metadata while the preservation queue prepares a build; anyone can vote a missing title up by requesting a playable version. For local play, DOSBox / DOSBox-X / DOSBox Staging are the standard emulators on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Modern storefronts (GOG in particular) also ship pre-configured DOSBox bundles for many of the bigger names.

Not natively — 64-bit Windows dropped the NTVDM compatibility layer DOS programs relied on. The answer is the same as on any other modern OS: use DOSBox-X locally, or open the title here and play it in the browser. Both give you working CPU, sound, video, and keyboard mapping without touching the host system.

MS-DOS shipped with IBM PCs in 1981. The earliest commercial DOS games arrived alongside it — Microsoft Adventure (1981), DONKEY.BAS (1981), and the first IBM-branded ports of arcade classics. Most of these are catalogued here under the 1981–84 era.

Legally, it depends on the rights-holder. Some publishers (Bethesda's id Software titles, Apogee / 3D Realms back catalog, Sierra under Activision) periodically re-release DOS games as freeware or sell them on GOG. Others have abandoned the code without releasing it — those live in a grey 'abandonware' zone. dos.games surfaces titles whose status the community has documented; a request from a current rights-holder always wins.

DOSBox is the open-source emulator that recreates an early-90s PC — CPU, EGA/VGA, Sound Blaster, AdLib, and all. It's the standard way DOS games are played on modern hardware. You don't need to install it to use dos.games — DOSBox-X is compiled to WebAssembly and runs inside your browser tab. For offline / local play, the standalone DOSBox installers are still the recommended path.

An informal term for commercial software whose rights-holder no longer sells or supports it. Legally it's still copyrighted; practically, many abandonware titles can't be bought anywhere. The DOS catalog is full of them — and a big reason community archives like this one exist.

Tight scope, sharp design, and shareware distribution that put complete games in the hands of millions of players. The DOS era invented or perfected most of the genres still on Steam today — FPS, RTS, point-and-click, isometric RPG, city sim, space sim — and a lot of those originals hold up better than their late-90s successors.

Continuously. The order is computed from community ratings and play data on the catalog itself — when members rate a title, the page reflects it on the next render. No editorial reshuffle, no manual override.