Re-releases of old games and DRM-free resurrections of bygone-era classics have become more and more common, but there’s still a lot of important gaming history that just can’t be bought digitally today. In many cases, these games are left to collect dust because of a snare of legal issues caused by bankruptcies, lawsuits, layoffs, and mergers. These situations lead to cases where one publisher owns the rights to the game’s name, another publisher owns the rights to the game’s sequels, and no one at all owns the rights to publish a game digitally. Others sit and wait because there’s just no interest today in a minor success from 1993.

Abandonware can still be acquired, obviously, but we’re hopeful that our favorites will eventually be better preserved, updated to run on modern PCs, and made widely available for future generations. Until then, here are some of our favorite games that primarily live on in used game bins, online resellers, and attic CD-ROM collections.