How Flash games shaped the video game industry (2020)

Flash was one of the best new technologies of the digital age, allowing nearly effortless creativity with easy tools and low-bandwidth, reliable delivery. It was glorious.<p>It was overused, terribly, and often used for questionable purposes (e.g., rendering a static website, or the dreaded SIFR). But it was like MySpace in how well and quickly it democratized creativity on the web, except it also afforded motion and games and video. Flash was great.<p>Adobe is awful, though. I’m not sure if Flash is the most useful thing they’ve killed outright, but it might be. I almost wish I could believe it was intentional, that they bought it to kill it. I really do think it was pure greed and stupidity, though. Most of what Adobe has done in the last 20 years is rent-seeking.<p>Imagine if they’d been a good steward of the tech, made it stable and performant on low-power devices. Yeah, Steve Jobs put the final nail in the coffin. Adobe administered the poison and tailored the funeral suit. Screw Adobe.

An important detail that isn&#x27;t touched on here: the Flash authoring tools were proprietary and much too expensive for hobbyists to afford. While many users simply pirated the tools, there was still a vast gulf between authors and the much larger audience of players.<p>The web today is a much more capable ecosystem than &quot;HTML5&quot; was for the original iPhone, and while many web developers crinkle their projects into minified source or opaque WASM blobs, every user has browser developer tools at their fingertips for peeking behind the curtain and making changes live.<p>It is perhaps most surprising that in the post-Flash world no comparable development environments have sprung up to replace its end-to-end animation and interactivity workflow. Game &quot;engines&quot; like Unity and Godot have captured much of the game development audience for Flash, but their ability to produce web exports is clearly an afterthought, producing huge files, glacial load times, and often simply crashing in any browser that isn&#x27;t a bleeding-edge instance of Chrome.

So I just bought the latest Itch.io bundle for the California wildfires [1]. I bought it partly because there are a few decent &quot;big&quot; indie games on there, but mostly because these mega itch bundles nostalgically remind me of two similar eras in my life: Digging through Shareware CD mega packs, and browsing for weird games on Newgrounds.<p>The shareware CDs were fun, because they always had enticing titles like &quot;More than 800 games!&quot; or something like that, and as a kid I would dig around the directory structures and play the weird stuff that they had pulled off BBS&#x27;s. Some of them games would be good, most of them would be pretty mediocre, some would be bad, but it sort of felt like you were unearthing stuff, trying to find an interesting game as you played.<p>Similarly, I would do the same thing on Newgrounds a lot as a teenager. It was fun to find unique games, especially since a lot of these games really had no ambitions of making money, so they could so a lot of things that you couldn&#x27;t get away with in retail games. You could make them hyper-violent, or gratuitous sexual content, or just odd humor that wasn&#x27;t really meant to be understood by anyone but the creator and their friend group.<p>My first &quot;real&quot; job after dropping out of college was writing Flash and Coldfusion software in 2012, because I had cut my teeth with Actionscript as a teenager. This was after Steve Jobs&#x27; infamous letter, but Flash was still more or less relevant, and I&#x27;m grateful to have had paying work with it, if only briefly.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itch.io&#x2F;b&#x2F;2863&#x2F;california-fire-relief-bundle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itch.io&#x2F;b&#x2F;2863&#x2F;california-fire-relief-bundle</a>

The current equivalent of Flash games is Roblox games.<p>They also start instantly, and can be created quite quickly. Creators there are often young, experiment rapidly. There are platform-specific trends that someone invents, and which then spread. I fully expect to see new genres and widely known creators being born there.<p>For instance the creator of the massively popular Steam game &quot;Lethal Company&quot; got their start making Roblox games.

I remember a few peak Newgrounds games from two decades ago more vividly than AAA, 60hr games that 100%&#x27;ed a few years ago.

Anyone remember Miniclip.com? Something I didn&#x27;t realize at the time was that their &quot;Top 10 List&quot; was not actually based on usage stats, but based on their editorial decisions and decisions of games to pay to be on the list.

Seeing the testimonials here reminds me of why working in Engineering at Kongregate was one of the most rewarding stops along my career.

It&#x27;s really interesting how Macromedia Flash software unlocked insane creative potential in so so many people in domains of animation and games. I think nothing ever before or after managed to do anything even remotely similar.

I have Flash to thank as my gateway into real programming. I was very young (11 or 12 years old). I created personal project games that really helped me love programming. They were never good enough to be published, but I enjoyed them.<p>At the time with no guidance, trying to build desktop applications was overwhelming (I couldn&#x27;t figure out where to start), and building complicated games in the browser with HTML and JavaScript wasn&#x27;t a thing (there was no HTML 5 or web canvas). Building a real game in a real game engine felt impossibly out of reach for me at the time.<p>Flash, through ActionScript 2 and 3, gave me that portal to make something real, and taught me all of my fundamentals around loops, functions, arrays, etc. I found a home in StackOverflow and learnt a huge amount. I won&#x27;t pretend that my games were great, but they really helped to solidify that programming was something that I loved.<p>Without Flash I don&#x27;t know that I would be where I am today. I now work as an IC in a huge international company. I didn&#x27;t go down the game development route as I assumed that I would, as I learnt that my passion was in programming itself and not in just writing games. The Flash games were on my personal website when I applied for internships, and I&#x27;m sure I have them to thank in part for helping get me through the door (my interviewer did check out the projects on my website).<p>I was sad, but understanding, when Flash finally came to an end. It felt like an end of an era for me, despite having not used it for a very long time.<p>If you got this far, thanks for taking the time to read my reflections!

Yes it was crazy times. Flash was full of possibilities.<p>Until Steve Jobs went on the toot horn and told everyone Flash is terrible and it needs to die. No surprise there, old Steve just launched the app store and wanted 30% of every game thank you very much.<p>Then to everyone&#x27;s surprise, the Adobe CEO went on TV and agreed publicly that Flash had to go and we&#x27;re working on better &quot;open&quot; tools.<p>All flash developers around the world, even &quot;certified&quot; ones like me (lol!), watch in disdain and disbelief. We&#x27;re HTML5 developers now. Back to backbone and jquery we go!<p>Long Live Macromedia Flash, and F Adobe. AS3 was OP back in the javascript days where it couldn&#x27;t parse int properly. Flash got ridiculously fast after years of improvements, and it was unique with this blend of timeline and scripts. Adobe Flex was also a decent web application framework. We don&#x27;t talk about Director anymore, as well, who was a very powerful tool.<p>All of that is gone now, replaced by teams of 5 people to do the job of 1, and basically trying to get as productive as we were then.<p>But what about game frameworks for web games today? A wasteland. A hundred possibilities and none of them doing a particular stellar job.

I still wish more games, and UI as a whole, had &quot;press tab to see what you can interact with.&quot;

I was in high school when Flash was most popular. We played all kinds of Flash games during breaks and free hours. In the computer science branch, students were taught Java and Flash as the two main programming platforms :)

Discussed at the time (of the article):<p><i>Flash Game History</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23922206">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23922206</a> - July 2020 (69 comments)

Fortunately someone decided to archive all of the flash games so we can play them today:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flashpointarchive.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flashpointarchive.org&#x2F;</a>

This website does not appear to render the games it claims to on Firefox Mobile

I have lots of fond memories of playing these mini flash games as a kid :)

What if Firefox were to gain a “SWF viewer”?<p>It has a PDF viewer already!

The internet has never been as good as it was when flash was at its peak.<p>Just this past week Trump made a tit of himself on camera with Zelenskyy. If this happened in 2005 there&#x27;d already be some minigame out where youd be Zelenskyy fighting JD Vance.<p>But flash is bad because it&#x27;s not semantic markup, so instead we have react slop serving reaction videos istead.

This is an absolutely beautiful work of art and it saddens me that it does not have more upvotes.