Play Janitor Joe Online

Janitor Joe came out in 1984 as part of the MS-DOS Classic Games series, developed by Donn Nauert. It was one of those early PC games that felt perfectly at home on a beige box monitor, a straightforward action title from a time when genres were still being defined. You didn't need a complicated backstory; the premise was right there in the name.

You control Joe, a janitor, tasked with cleaning up a building overrun by bizarre enemies like mutant rats and flying toilets. The objective is to clear each room of these pests and collect all the trash bags before moving to the next screen. Signature mechanics include screen-by-screen exploration, using your starting mop to attack, and finding power-ups like a flamethrower for more effective cleaning. The pacing is fast, and the difficulty ramps up quickly as enemies become more aggressive and numerous. It feels frantic and oddly satisfying to blast through a level, turning a mess into order with sheer firepower.

Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".