Found another site about homebrew RPGs:
http://www.rpgdx.net/

From there I got to a project - seemingly incomplete - called Valkin 2:
http://lyrian.obnix.com/valkin2/en/index.html

so many games developed and left hanging by small teams and individuals, all those sites and communities lost to time. interesting finds

gerry wrote on 2021-06-22, 10:39:

so many games developed and left hanging by small teams and individuals, all those sites and communities lost to time.

A greater problem IMO is that many games were completed and fully playable, yet lost because everyone was busy with well-known titles.

A couple more potentially interesting German sites about free games (Wayback Machine):
http://www.mrgame.de/
http://www.gamezworld.de/

Alright, let's arrange some of the findings into the good old-fashioned list by genre:

Adventure

• Twinland

Arcade

• Biprolex+
• Cosmic Ambush
• Greedy
• Pebbles
• Tecnoball Z

Fighting

• Fostiator

First-Person Shooter

• Absence
• Freaks
• Lord of Lightning [download]
• The Orb of Dilaaria
• Resistance

Platform

• Akiko and Minami
• Bert the Barbarian
• Indian Commander in Robot Confrontation

Puzzle

• Blupimania
• Bref 2.0
• Bubble Puzzle
• The Continued Adventures of Cyberbox
• Flynn Sprint

Racing

• Maximum Overdrive
• Overheat
• Topspeed 300

Real-Time Strategy

• Future Conflict [download]

Role-Playing

• Aleshar: The World of Ice
• Gene Splicing
• Gladius

Shooter

• Alien Assault II
• Baller! And Forget
• Frenetic Plus

Simulation

• Combat Flight Simulator [v0.2]
• Eagles
• FGFly [v.01c]
• Space Glider
• Vertigo

Turn-Based Strategy

• Ata - Extracts from the American Civil War [v1.00] [patch to v.15]

Prototype / incomplete

• Acrophy [RTS]
• Valkin II [RPG]
• Fenix Blade [RPG]

Here's a nice one. Robot Redemption is a game built on the source code of Hovertank 3D.

I was just browsing the DEMU Classic PC Games collection and discovered information about a DOS-based train simulator that was made by a small Polish hobbyist dev team called Mechanik. Apparently it gained substantial international popularity, mostly thanks to word of mouth via the early Internet in the second half of the 90s, because the version I stumbled upon at DEMU is from Australia.

Anyway, almost immediately I found tons of pages:
http://pages.hotbot.com/edu/train_nut/pociagu.html
http://web.wanadoo.be/kris.vandeputte/index.htm
http://www.heland.from.pl/
http://mechanik-en57.cba.pl/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/en57a/
http://www.bvecornwall.co.uk/wordpress/mechanik/

Additionally, the free, open source train sim called OpenBVE has at some point added support for Mechanik routes:
https://openbve-project.net/play-mechanik/

Granted this is not as much a game as a serious vehicle simulator, but nevertheless I find it pretty interesting!

Page with links to free or shareware DOS chess games:
http://webhome.globalserve.net/chess/chesprgs.htm

Nice collection of QBasic games:
http://games.qbasic.com/

FYI the QB games directory moved to http://games.phatcode.net/

Yup, I realised that shortly after posting the WM link, thanks! It's a very well curated directory of QB games.

I stumbled upon a neat puzzle platformer game called Boondog while browsing MobyGames:

I can totally imagine playing this on my old 386 back in the 90s.

A rather nice looking, albeit incomplete, side-scrolling beat-'em-up: Night Stalkers.

Wayback Machine snapshot of the author's page with more screenshots: http://home.earthlink.net/~tjnolan/stalkers.html

Some interesting looking free games here:
http://www.oxeyegames.com/

UPD: An interesting 3D FPS engine called CSP Engine (which stands for Cyberskunk Pictures Engine). They released five short games as demonstration:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050204215044/ht … log.ch/dropper/

Looks not bad at all!

A few more liberated DOS games.

First off, one of the developers from H/M Software released the registered versions of their games, Cyber Chopper and Station 7, as freeware:

ChuckHomic wrote:

Hi, sorry for the delay. Here are the games in the series: […]
Show full quote

Hi, sorry for the delay. Here are the games in the series:

Cyber Chopper:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1eZVjtbQLSVk … uYezMIGxB2-i2EA

Escape from Station 7:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mCZIhJOh0R8 … _iSXA_pblXPXk_s

These are the original installers, so Station 7 still retains the "This is not Shareware. Don't steal me" language. Use the following license instead:

As the original author, I hereby grant an individual non-commercial license to whoever wants to play these games, as long as you do not misrepresent the authorship, or attempt to profit from the distribution. Contact me if you are interested in any other rights.

If you know how to run these on modern computers, let me know. I was able to run them on Virtual Box, but without sound and kind of slow. [source]

Secondly, I just learned that German developer Tim Wellhausen released the game Conquests, which is essentially a prototype for a later, more refined game called Crusade.

.HHC. ~Software~/Random '64 downloads
Carl Erikson's games

Also here's a list of free games that might come in useful (Wayback Machine).

More sites with free games via the Wayback Machine:
InterAction Studios
Nephewsoft
Fractile Games
New Games for DOS
Radian Entertainment
Binary Spells

No Future? -- German environmentalist edutainment/awareness campaign game (MobyGames page)
Mänick Mänschion -- a German "parody" of the LucasArts classic adventure
Hero -- adventure game
BRICKS -- puzzle game(s)
Laser Tank -- another puzzle game

MrFlibble wrote on 2022-05-19, 15:41:

Laser Tank -- another puzzle game

Isn't Laser Tank still alive here? https://laser-tank.com/

konc wrote on 2022-05-20, 07:15:

Isn't Laser Tank still alive here? https://laser-tank.com/

Nice, thanks for the link! I was wading through the Wayback Machine stuff and did not check if the site/game was still online.

Mister Kid -- a Super Mario Bros.-esque arcade platformer written in QBasic.