Master listing of all IBM PC/DOS games

List of known IBM PC (mostly DOS) games/edutainment titles 1980-2008

Last Updated: check the txt file below (changes often)

Current size: roughly 10,000 titles.

This is an attempt to document a listing of all known games for the IBM PC/PCjr/Tandy that ran in DOS mode.

What is included:
Commercial games/edutainment titles
Freeware games, particularly those released before the concept of shareware was common.
Popular shareware titles- Duke Nukems, Commander Keens, etc.
Kids games
Data disks / expansion packs

What is not included:
Windows titles (ideally anyway, yes there are lots of them still in the list)
Utilities

Gray area things that are in the list:
Reference software (some tutors are included)
Instructional software
Lots of Shareware titles (if there were a list, I'd add them)
many magazines on disk

A few windows bits and pieces are in here, apologies.
Not all expansion packs/addon disks are included, sorry.
Duplicates exist-mostly due to naming conventions, ie "Shogun (1988)(Infocom)" and "James Clavell's Shogun (1988)(Infocom)" but I try to spot them. These are removed by hand.

Click here for the list
Click here for a zipfile of the list.

Software and strategy:

The list was compiled from several sources and some custom fuzzy string matching software which I wrote for this project.
The software takes a master list, and compares a new listing against it. After tweaking the comparison parameters (removal of "The", and non alphanumeric characters) the comparison will yield one of 3 values:

1) exact match - items in the compare-to file which provide an exact match are thrown out.
2) partial match - a comparison yielding a result between 87-99% gets outputted to a file called "haves.txt." These matches are then verified by hand to make sure nothing gets missed. Common mismatches here are things like "Unnecessary Roughness '94" vs "Unnecessary Roughness '95"
3) mismatch - items yielding less than 87% get outputted to a file called "havenots.txt" These are then glanced over by hand to remove obvious duplicates.

The resulting "havenots" and the master list are then merged and sorted. A cursory glance over the master list is then performed to remove immediate duplicates.

Download the software

Download the source (MFC++)

Don't expect much glamor from the software or source code. It works for its intended purpose and not much else. I often tweak the source to work with special case input lists.

I also used a variety of list tweaking software to help manipulate the data into the correct formatting. Sources are not available as they were one-offs to solve a particular list's formatting issues and then discarded.

If you have a list that you'd like run through the software and compared against the master, a few minimum requirements exist:

Games must be listed in the following format:

Life & Death (1988)(Software Toolworks, Inc., The)
Life & Death 2: The Brain (1990)(Software Toolworks, Inc., The)
Life in the Fast Lane (1989)(Softdisk Publishing)
Lifeforce Tenka (1997)(SCEE)/Lifeforce Tenka [SCEE][1997][rip].rar
LifesBattle (1997)(Hummer Software)

One line per title, standard DOS CR/LF used to denote the next entry.

The software compares titles only. Because a majority of the lists used to combine the data had "titles (year)(publisher)" information in some form, I use the ( in the year field to denote the end of the title of the game. This may cause a few casualties in very early software titles, such as "poker" or "cribbage" but because the year and publisher data often varied enough between two lists, this was the only manageable solution I could come up with.

Contact:

I'd be happy to compare your list of DOS games against the master and update it for everyone to share.
If you've got a list that you think is accurate, ideally with year and publisher data included, send it me and I'll see what shakes out.
If you have updates to the above list or see anything missing from it, please contact me.
The more eyes on the project, the more accurate it'll be.

Please note: This is not a listing of all the games I have in my collection. Far from it in fact. Don't bother asking me for any of the software listed-I will ignore all requests. I am merely compiling a resource, not a warez depot. C'mon!