Browsers stopped supporting flash at the end of 2020, as we all moved into the world of HTML 5. With that, thousands of flash games would fade away into the distant past. That is a huge pity.
I'm not the only one who thought about that clearly, as it turns out BlueMaxima's Flashpoint exists.
Internet history and culture is important, and content made on web platforms including, but not limited to Adobe Flash, make up a significant portion of that culture. This project is dedicated to preserving as many experiences from these platforms as possible, so that they aren't lost to time. Since early 2018, Flashpoint has saved more than 90,000 games and 10,000 animations running on 33 different platforms.Flashpoint was started in January 2018 by BlueMaxima in an attempt to outrun the disappearance of content prior to the death of Flash. It has since evolved into an international project involving over 100 community contributors, encompassing both webgames and animations created for numerous internet plugins, frameworks, and standards.
Flash games were a key part of my life back in secondary school. Whether it be playing it at home or during school hours (heh), there were tons of great games to be explored across multiple websites.
In a way, flash games are like the predecessor to the apps we see on smart phones today. They are mostly casual games you can pick up and play. One key difference though were many of these were passion projects.
There are no in-app purchases or anything of that sort. In the early days especially, many of these were simply made by individuals who wanted to make games as a hobby and share them with the world.
Majority of the flash games around are low quality games of course, after all anyone could make one and get it out there. Yet in the midst of all of these were a number of high quality games of which many had simples concept but were very creative.
I remember some of them fondly. Amorphous+ was at the heart of it a very simple game - you could play with literally just your mouse, but yet you could play over and over. Heli Attack 3 was a simple yet challenging platform bullet hell game. Etherena beta as it's name suggests is incomplete and really underrated, but I loved it and had always wanted to create something like that myself (I tried but failed, perhaps I could try again). There was also a whole bunch of games which paired comedy with unique ideas.
Recently I've been thinking about the past a fair bit, how far we've come, and all the things we left behind. Not in a sad way or anything, but just how fast life has moved and all these things have become a part of history. Teenagers today, heck probably even some people in the early 20s today, would never have experienced some of these things that were once instrumental parts of our lives. They don't know neopets, they don't know maplestory, they don't know flash games. The 'old school' casual games they used to know would have been angry birds.
I installed Flashpoint and now have access to these games. Played a couple and yes, truly those were the days. I'll play these any day over all the casual games that try to persuade you to buy more gems any day.
When does history become history? There is no clear definition of that, but to me with the death of flash this part of internet culture has truly been relegated to history. In that regard, I'm really glad this project exists. Will try to download the key games I used to play and keep them safe somewhere, so that years down the road from time to time when I have that nostalgic itch, I can pull them out again.
---