There were many more Flash games. Millions more.
Played billions of times on thousands of different gaming websites.
It was creative chaos.
🤯
Flash games were the gateway for many developers in the games industry, and served as an experimental
playground
for distilling games down to their most pure and engaging elements. The end-of-life of Flash in December
2020 marks the end of one of the most creative periods in the history of gaming.
It all started in 1996, when the Flash player was first released. Originally it was intended for Web
graphics
and animations, but when it got its own programming language in 2000, developers started to use
it to make games.
That was the same year we saw the rise of the first automated Flash games website, Newgrounds.
Anyone could upload their games and they were published immediately.
The following graph shows the 2000 most popular Flash games on Newgrounds in chronological order.
Each bubble represents a game and the area of the bubble corresponds to the number of times that game
was
played on Newgrounds.
Everything by everyone
Websites like Newgrounds made it possible for anyone to publish their games without a studio
or a publisher. Developers uploaded experimental games, artistic games, brutally violent games, funny games
and
activist games. It was the wild west of gaming and the creativity that came out of that environment was
amazing.
People made games just because they wanted to make games, not to turn a profit.
The Flash workflow
Flash had a designer centric workflow that brought together art, animation, and coding.
People that wouldn’t have written code otherwise could gradually make their animations into games. An
example is
the game Xiao Xiao, which started as a simple stick figure animation
that evolved into a fighting game.
Developers also didn’t have to worry about the technical details of cross-platform support. A game written
in Flash 20 years ago is still playable today, while games written for iOS or Android require regular
updates to keep them working on new phones.
Accessibility
Anyone could play Flash games by just clicking a link. Playing and sharing games today is still not as easy
as it was 20 years ago.
Decentralization
The Fancy Pants Adventures game was played a few million times on
Newgrounds, but across all websites, it
was played more than 300 million times. Most Flash games were featured on thousands of different websites.
If a game
didn’t connect with the audience
of one site, it could still reach many others. The Internet was a more decentralized place back then.
Nowadays, games like the McDonald’s Videogame, where you corrupt
politicians and destroy the rainforest to make
fast food, would most likely be banned from the App Store, cutting it off from a large percentage of
players.
Rapid iteration
The culture around Flash games promoted original ideas and made it acceptable to fail.
Most games were made in less than a few months, some even in just a few days.
If your game didn’t do well, you could just make another one. Game design evolved at a rapid pace.
The beginning of the end for Flash
In 2010, two years after the release of the iPhone, Steve Jobs wrote an open letter explaining why Flash
wouldn’t be allowed on Apple’s platform. Flash had security issues, drained
the
battery, and was built for desktop computers, not mobile devices with touch interfaces.
Read the letter
Flash exodus
By 2012, the number of players on Flash game websites was declining and fewer and fewer games were being
made in Flash.
Many developers jumped ship to make mobile or console games, and former Flash game animators started Youtube
channels.
It was not just the rise of the iPhone that was responsible for the decline of Flash. Ultimately, the
Internet became a different place that had to support a wide variety of different devices.
“Being a creator of and steward for Flash as a platform was a privilege. I felt that we were building a
pencil
and it was the community of creators that was responsible for the creation of Flash as a creative form. Our
job
as stewards was to anticipate needs, listen and make sure it worked. The core idea of having an accessible
system for creating interactive media content that works across a range of devices is still a powerful one.
Just
like pencil and paper is a powerful tool. I hope it will happen again. Many years ago, I had the idea of
Flash
Forever. How can we treat what is created in Flash as valuable information like a book? Sadly, the need to
drive
business growth by adding features and capabilities, trumped the need for permanence. It’s great that Flash
still lives in the skills and experiences of the community of people who learned and grew with it.”
Jonathan Gay
Creator of Flash
“Over the years, my companies have made a number of software tools, but Flash was by far the most
impactful. For me, the most gratifying thing has been having Flash animators thank me for giving them a
career. Not just a tool, but a career. But the person that really is the one to be thanked is Jonathan Gay,
the visionary behind Flash from day one and all the way until Adobe acquired it. Jonathan is an amazing man,
and I was lucky to start working with him from the time he was a 17-year old in high school.”
Charlie Jackson
Co-Founder of FutureWave Software
Blog
Twitter
“Having grown up tinkering with animation software while programming text-based games, Flash was the first
program that merged art and code in a way that I always hoped could be possible. Even better, anything you
made could be played instantly on any computer via the web.
It was a magical time of experimentation and a lot of goofing off with friends found over the Internet. The
moment was especially ideal for newcomers and outsiders, who now had a low barrier to entry and no industry
gatekeeping. The joy of that era embodies what Newgrounds seeks to achieve to this very day; a place where
people with no experience can learn, create and share wonderful things together.”
“Flash made the online game industry evolve, flourish and then explode. We played a small part, but it was a
huge part of my life. I saw our games being played close to 3 billion times, with some including Bowman
being played hundreds of millions of times. It is with great sadness I am witness to the death of Flash.
Flash games made me, my business and altered my life. They allowed me to connect with the world and feel
slightly less alone.”
Frank Valzano
Creator of Bowman and FreeWorldGroup.com
Play
game
Website
“I owe my success as a game developer to Flash. My Rebuild series and my husband’s Fantastic Contraption
both
started as Flash games played by millions of people freely in their browsers. That ease of sharing was so
revolutionary – we went from buying games at the mall to just clicking a link! Flash gave all these small
experimental games an instant audience, and gave rise to indie games as we know them today including my
own.”
“For me, Flash was an integral part of my game dev journey – a wonderful, eccentric piece of tech that I
will always hold dear. I’d been making games using various tools and languages since I was a kid but when
Flash arrived on the scene it was a ‘lightbulb moment’, because I was a little bit of an artist, a little
bit of a coder and this bridged that gap perfectly.
There just weren’t any tools that I know of that allowed animators to make creations and coders to bring
them to life. The fact that it compiled into this one tiny SWF file that could be distributed everywhere,
(fonts, sounds, graphics and all!) just meant games could go viral in an instant and reach millions of
players – which is exactly what happened when I launched the first Swords and Sandals game way back in 2007.
It’s funny, I still find myself defending Flash against the lumbering and dreary HTML5 pipeline that
proclaimed itself successor – even now, HTML5 gaming struggles to hold a candle to what Flash could do a
decade ago with a lack of decent vector animation and inconsistent performance across browers.
Ten years after Steve Jobs declared it dead tech I still have a bunch of games on Steam made with AIR ( a
sort of desktop ‘successor’ to Flash ) that have sold well enough to allow me to build an indie games
business and given me the freedom to continue the Swords and Sandals story – I owe Flash a huge debt, thanks
for saving the universe (for me at least!)”
“The old Flash scene was an incredible place to learn gamedev: it was a lively and fun c
13 Comments
keyle
Yes it was crazy times. Flash was full of possibilities.
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.
Then to everyone's surprise, the Adobe CEO went on TV and agreed publicly that Flash had to go and we're working on better "open" tools.
All flash developers around the world, even "certified" ones like me (lol!), watch in disdain and disbelief. We're HTML5 developers now. Back to backbone and jquery we go!
Long Live Macromedia Flash, and F Adobe. AS3 was OP back in the javascript days where it couldn'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't talk about Director anymore, as well, who was a very powerful tool.
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.
But what about game frameworks for web games today? A wasteland. A hundred possibilities and none of them doing a particular stellar job.
stuartjohnson12
This is an absolutely beautiful work of art and it saddens me that it does not have more upvotes.
hyperhopper
This website does not appear to render the games it claims to on Firefox Mobile
sonofhans
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.
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.
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.
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.
scotty79
It'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.
tombert
So I just bought the latest Itch.io bundle for the California wildfires [1]. I bought it partly because there are a few decent "big" 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.
The shareware CDs were fun, because they always had enticing titles like "More than 800 games!" 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'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.
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't get away with in retail games. You could make them hyper-violent, or gratuitous sexual content, or just odd humor that wasn't really meant to be understood by anyone but the creator and their friend group.
My first "real" 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' infamous letter, but Flash was still more or less relevant, and I'm grateful to have had paying work with it, if only briefly.
[1] https://itch.io/b/2863/california-fire-relief-bundle
rfarley04
I remember a few peak Newgrounds games from two decades ago more vividly than AAA, 60hr games that 100%'ed a few years ago.
RodgerTheGreat
An important detail that isn'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.
The web today is a much more capable ecosystem than "HTML5" 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.
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 "engines" 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't a bleeding-edge instance of Chrome.
dang
Discussed at the time (of the article):
Flash Game History – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23922206 – July 2020 (69 comments)
diebeforei485
Anyone remember Miniclip.com? Something I didn't realize at the time was that their "Top 10 List" was not actually based on usage stats, but based on their editorial decisions and decisions of games to pay to be on the list.
jvoorhis
Seeing the testimonials here reminds me of why working in Engineering at Kongregate was one of the most rewarding stops along my career.
bemmu
The current equivalent of Flash games is Roblox games.
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.
For instance the creator of the massively popular Steam game "Lethal Company" got their start making Roblox games.
hassleblad23
I have lots of fond memories of playing these mini flash games as a kid :)