Developer: Quetoo Team
Release Date: May 22, 2026

So this is interesting, I just stumbled on this randomly a few weeks back right after it was released, although it was apparently in the works for twenty years.

Quetoo is an open source project that's a combination of id Tech engines and technologies, incorporating every graphics technique the source port communities are known for, and recreating some of the classic maps of the Quake series without actually using any of its data.

The result is a purely community focused freeware arena shooter that can even be edited with modern tools like Trenchboom.
Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Developer: Team Hoi
Release Date: 1994

Also an Amiga game from Team Hoi, Clockwiser at first appears to be a standard issue match-3 game, but the twist is not something I've seen before. You are presented with two arrangements of tiles and your job is to make the left arrangement look like the right. Your only means of doing so is to draw a rectangular box and then rotate the tiles clockwise. On top of that there are a myriad of rules, everything from gravity to teleporters to bombs. I was also alerted to the existence of this game from one of the original game's authors which I thought was pretty cool.

Developer: Team Hoi
Release Date: August 1992

Another game where you can tell it's an Amiga game just by looking at it, Hoi hails from the era when developers were filling in the gaps, as well as the era when a commercially viable retail title could be handled by just a few people.

In Hoi you play as a dinosaur braving tests and obstacles in order to find a female partner, which is at least unusual in so far as premises go. I was alerted to the existence of this game from one of the original game's authors which I thought was pretty cool.

Developer: Apogee Software
Release Date: August 3, 1993
Source Code Release Date: August 5, 2018

An Apogee platformer that's a lot like Duke Nukem II but made from the Commander Keen engine, Bio Menace was never as popular as its contemporaries but developed a cult following of its own. You play as Snake Logan, a CIA operative who must save Metro City when it is invaded by mutants.

It was remastered in 2025 but the original was made freeware that same year as well.

  Buy Bio Menace on GOG.com

Developer: PopCap Games
Release Date: December 12, 2003

I'm pretty sure that of all the games on this site, this is the first one I've ever built that I originally played on the iPod. Zuma is essentially a match-3 puzzle game, with the twist being that the tiles are balls rolling down an etched path, and you play as a stationary frog idol thing and shoot matching balls from your mouth, with the goal to be clearing the chain before it can reach tne end of the path.

It has great music and sound design, colorful graphics, addictive gameplay, and works great for both quick diversions as well as extended gameplay sessions. I almost wish you could still use an iPod wheel as a controller.

Zuma was later re-released in an enhanced version dubbed Zuma Deluxe, which is the version you can still get off of Steam to this day, and the version that Zuma Portable uses.

Developer: PopCap Games
Release Date: May 5, 2009

Plants vs. Zombies is an example of casual game perfection, from developer PopCap Games at their peak, pre-acquisition. Effectively a tower defense game without being a tower defense game, it has a difficulty curve so incredibly well done that at some point you're pulling off elaborate strategies without ever feeling like you're not ready for it. With an addicting amount of depth, additional mini-games once you finish the campaign, and no microtransactions or mismatched mechanics, it's a game that absolutely holds up.

It's also a game where I had no idea there was a modding community, let alone a nearly perfect reverse engineered source port nearly five years in the making. I honestly thought for a minute it was some sort of trick but no, PvZ Portable is a true reverse engineered port.

NOTE: While PvZ-Portable definitely works with Plants vs. Zombies: Game of the Year Edition, I'm not clear if it works with the regular (non-GOTY) edition. As of this writing the GOTY edition is the only version on Steam. As far as I can tell it does not work with the recent Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted edition.

Developer: Jonas Echterhoff
Release Date: 2000

In another example of the charm of early 2000's Macintosh shareware, Reckless Drivin' is a fun top down driving game where you attempt to balance damaging other cars, avoiding the police, and making it to the end of the level in one piece. It was released in 2000 by Jonas Echterhoff who put out the source code and released the game as freeware in 2019 it was recently ported to modern systems by Darren Cohen.

Developer: Wildfire Games
Release Date: April 1, 2010
Source Code Release Date: July 10, 2009

0 A.D. is a game like Age of Empires, which is appropriate given that it started out its life a quarter century ago as an Age of Empires II mod. After close to a decade of work the team decided the AOE2 engine was too limiting and decided to expand to their own engine which they've been plugging away at ever since. As of this writing they left Alpha status a little under a month ago, and they recently got Apple Silicon support nailed down.

Note that we are linking to their download page instead of direct files as there are multiple download options including BitTorrent to save the developers some bandwidth.

Developer: Epic Games
Release Date: March 30, 2004

For a brief window it seemed as if the twitch arena shooter was going to go the way of the annual sports franchise, for better or worse. In that vein, Epic released the sequel to Unreal Tournament in 2003 as... Unreal Tournament 2003. This was then followed up in 2004 by Unreal Tournament 2004.

While content-wise, Unreal Tournament 2004 is a superset of Unreal Tournament 2003, the initial plans to make it cross-play with the matching maps from the previous entry did not survive technical changes. Neverheless, it was a popular entry with tons of content, maps, modes, and the DVD-ROM version contained a disc full of map editing and modding tutorials that may have produced innumerable game developers, cementing Unreal as a game engine licensing force. It was truly a golden era of gaming.

Unfortunately things didn't last - Epic's planned break from the yearly cadence eventually meant that what would have been Unreal Tournament 2007 became Unreal Tournament III, eschewing the annual concept, and a planned 2014 reboot got consumed by an unclear business plan and their decision to shift everything to Fortnite.

Still, the OldUnreal guys have done it again - and by that I mean they convinced Epic to let them work their magic on yet another Unreal-the-franchise title. This is a preview release, so I'm labeling it Early Access, but fire it up and experience what at least one gamer called "I had to check to make sure there wasn't an Xbox under my desk."

Developer: Ken Silverman
Release Date: January 1, 1993
Source Code Release Date: July 1, 2001

I'm going to be honest - for a long time I didn't know Ken's Labyrinth was a real game. Written by Ken Silverman as a teenager, the game is most known for being effectively the progenitor of the Build engine, which he later wrote. For some reason I always thought it was the name of a tech demo he used to get the 3D Realms gig, and not an actual commercial title.

But no, it's real, and it's fascinating. Sometimes when you have an early example of a game in a genre you get to see what they tried to do before they knew what worked. Like how Wolfenstein 3-D had points you could score, something later id Software titles never had. Ken's Labyrinth, though, has everything. Score? Check. Utterly random enemies? Check. No real plot or need for one? Of course. Graphics and sounds made by a passionate one-person team with no previous experience? Done. An in-game economy with vending and slot machines? Sure why the heck not. Toss in some photos of the developer and an audio clip of him welcoming you and you have the video game equivalent of a cult classic. The game was originally shareware and later published by Epic.

Silverman released the game as freeware in 1999 and the source in 2001. LAB3D/SDL is a source port started by Ryan “icculus” Gordon and like the Build engine that came after it, it's been through a chain of maintainers, including Katie Stafford, the latest of which is from Cameron Armstrong who brought it into modern Mac platforms.