Perhaps worse than the death of Flash was the death of Shockwave. I feel like so many Shockwave games I played back in the day are completely gone with no reference to them on the modern internet. Today, you can install some version of Flash on most operating systems, but I don't think there's any modern standalone Shockwave player and I could only get the plugin to work in Safari on macOS. Chrome and Firefox don't even run those types of plugins anymore.<p>There's one particular Shockwave game that I was recently able to recover from the depths of the Wayback Machine, which was a game from Disney for the Inspector Gadget movie; terrible film, but their website had this nifty little game that wasn't necessarily difficult but was addicting in that I wanted to see just how far I could go with it. For years I thought it was gone for good, and was glad to finally see it again after I lost it 15+ years ago.<p>Here it is in all its 1999 glory:
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20031017000018/http://www.disney.co.uk:80/gadget/repair.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20031017000018/http://www.disney...</a><p>I always liked it in part because I don't think I've seen a similar game. It's kind of like if you took the random shapes part of Tetris and added a "jigsaw puzzle" element.
It's a damn shame that HTML5 implementations of Flash, like Shumway (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software)</a>) and Swiffy (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Swiffy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Swiffy</a>) are no longer being actively developed. I would have thought running SWFs in the JS sandbox would be a good way to get the compatibility of Flash, without the insane security bugs that it comes with.<p>And in case anyone is still in doubt about Flash's security woes - take a gander at the Flash CVE page at <a href="https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...</a>. There were FIVE CVSS 10 bugs (total and complete remote code execution with minimal user interaction, i.e. visit a malicious page and your computer is owned) published just <i>two months ago</i>. The author of Flashpoint is absolutely correct in his assessment that Flash will be overrun with security bugs as soon as it hits EOL in 2020.
I do understand some of the reasons behind the web community’s rejection of flash over the past decade and a half — security and accessibility issues, closed standards, etc. However Flash and Shockwawe technology enabled smooth interactive graphics on 90’s and 00’s desktop hardware, in packages that are friendly for 56kbps dialup connections. Nothing compares to it, still to this day — web platform tech still horribly underperforms and is only now capable of what flash could do a decade ago. We could also blame Apple and Smartphones and Yourube for its demise, but I feel like we haven’t moved forward in terms of quality shareable interactive media since Flash.
For those of you involved in saving flash projects, consider Haxe and OpenFL :<p><a href="https://haxe.org/" rel="nofollow">https://haxe.org/</a><p><a href="http://www.openfl.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.openfl.org/</a><p>Case Studies:<p><a href="https://haxe.org/blog/tivo-using-haxe-to-improve-user-experience-for-millions-of-customers/" rel="nofollow">https://haxe.org/blog/tivo-using-haxe-to-improve-user-experi...</a><p><a href="https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/12/flowplay-overhauls-vegas-world-ditches-adobe-flash-for-haxe/" rel="nofollow">https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/12/flowplay-overhauls-vegas-...</a>
Here is the latest dump with almost 4000 titles <a href="https://archive.org/details/Flashpoint3.3.zip" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/Flashpoint3.3.zip</a>
Let this be a warning to young developers tying into proprietary platforms.<p>(Not one mention in TFA of <a href="http://homestarrunner.com" rel="nofollow">http://homestarrunner.com</a>, for shame)
Thank you to everyone preserving these games. I made over 40 flash games in my career and I'd like to see at least 3 of them preserved indefinitely
To capture more than just the SWF:<p>- Load the game into a real web browser and let it run for a bit<p>- Intercept all network requests with a caching proxy<p>- Save the external resources loaded to disk<p>Would that help? The process could be automated, though only for games which load all their resources without human interaction. But then, clicking through a few screens to get a game to start is a much less time- and knowledge-intensive task per game than reverse-engineering the source code of each, at least to get as much data backed up in some state as possible before it disappears.
From the article:<p><i>There’s eventually going to be one question on the lips of everyone involved, though: is this legal? And the only real answer is nobody knows and really, nobody should care.</i><p>I can understand having an urge to preserve something that is in danger of decaying past recovery — I feel the same way when I see an interesting building or a classic airplane rotting away somewhere — but the usual course of action is to choose what you find most worth saving, <i>purchase it from the owner</i>, and restore your new possession. Any other course isn't legal, in most cases, and it isn't here either, in most cases. I care about that, and some of the game creators will care about it too.
Some years from today it will be proper chunk of retro scene, but I for one am happy we’ve moved on. Flash was horrible and a burden.<p>Edit: missing word
And this is the problem I have with tying anything to a remote server. Every digital movie, song, book, or video game that requires a remote server for patches, activation, or anything else will eventually end up like this.<p>What happens in 5 years when Sony turns off their PS3 servers? And what happens in 10 years when most of the hard drives in those PS3s need replacing?
Not only this, but I've had a very difficult time even finding original SWFs of animutations. Albinoblacksheep only seems to host video renders these days. While that works, many authors hid extra content in their videos, and that's now lost to time.