as far as I’m aware, I’m really the only one trying
July 31, 2018 1:15 PM   Subscribe

Allow me to summarize. In less than two years from the time of this article, hundreds of thousands of games are likely to disappear from the internet, forever. Simply no longer playable. Hundreds of millions of views, likes, 5-star reviews, 1-star reviews…all gone. The companies who helped bring these games to life don’t seem concerned. The people who made these games aren’t exactly talking about it, to my knowledge.
That's because Ben Latimore is talking about saving Flash video games once Adobe's support for it expires in 2020.
posted by MartinWisse (33 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
Adobe's short-sighted ass could throw a couple of millions at Archive.org for the express purpose of archiving Flash content because they are literally making bazillions of dollars every day from their doodling software suite's monthly subscription fees and selling hats and mech suits on their darknet market. Flash will have its renaissance one day and maybe, just maybe, Adobe wants to be know as the generous patron who preserved this wonderful crazy tech for the future.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:41 PM on July 31, 2018 [7 favorites]


Puffin web browser supports Flash and apparently its execution is in the cloud. this is very useful for Flash support on mobile devices with no local security risk.

the game portal I associate with Flash is ShockRave because a friend worked on their bulls eye rating widget. at the time it was still called ShockWave and the Flash part was being added : ShockWave Flash.
posted by gkr at 1:47 PM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Oh no! Homestuck! Platinum Grit! Orisinal! Gahhhh!
posted by domo at 2:26 PM on July 31, 2018 [11 favorites]


I share Domo's sentiment-- I was in my 20s for the heyday of Flash, and I had an entire bookmark folder full of games and cartoons titled "we adore flash". I'm glad it's being archived, but I hope they reverse-engineer some way to make it easily playable to the online passer-by.
posted by Pallas Athena at 2:45 PM on July 31, 2018


There’s a metric butt-ton of really great Japanese escape games that were Flash-based, and will almost absolutely never be ported over to something like Unity or somesuch. I wasted so much time playing them, and it’ll be a shame to see them disappear.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:58 PM on July 31, 2018 [5 favorites]


One of the more important games of my life was You Have to Burn the Rope, which is an exceptionally short game. For whatever reason, it was this short, somewhat surreal flash game that really made me start to think about games as art. Anyways, flash games have always been somewhat stupid, but there are some timeless classics that we'll lose without a project like this.
posted by TypographicalError at 3:10 PM on July 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


Awesome to see someone is actually building an archive!

Back when Adobe announced the end of Flash someone started a “petition” on GitHub to convince Adobe to open-source Flash. I was very sceptical of their goals, but did write:
And if you are not a programmer? Well, you could start archiving. […] Start pushing old SWF games and content to the Internet Archive so when 2020 comes along you still have something to look at instead of finding out Newgrounds is down […]
As I ended my reaction there, I will end this comment here, with a link to my favourite flash game: Pearls Before Swine. Still online more than 10 years after it was first shown to me by my favourite math teacher.
posted by Martijn at 3:20 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


My first MeFi post (ELEVEN YEARS AGO) was The Impossible Quiz. The link in the post (and the one in the comments) is broken, but you can still play it here.
posted by Rock Steady at 3:24 PM on July 31, 2018


I just started playing escape games again, and this makes me so sad. They're stupid, but they're satisfying stupid.
posted by Mchelly at 3:32 PM on July 31, 2018




A few months ago, I tracked down a version of the delightful pianolina game that used to be on the site of German piano company Grotrian; I think I learned about that from a post here, in the day.
posted by thelonius at 4:08 PM on July 31, 2018


My first MeFi post (ELEVEN YEARS AGO) was The Impossible Quiz. The link in the post (and the one in the comments) is broken, but you can still play it here.

"THIS FLASH FILE IS A BIGGUN ...I couldn't get it below 8MB..."
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:19 PM on July 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


32-bit iOS games have already suffered this fate, and I don't know of any coordinated effort to preserve them.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 4:19 PM on July 31, 2018 [7 favorites]


Martijn: Back when Adobe announced the end of Flash someone started a “petition” on GitHub to convince Adobe to open-source Flash.

Flash has a weird relationship with open source. A decade or so ago, Adobe released (most of) the spec for SWF files. (Enjoy the latest public release I've been able to find.) It was enough to build Gnash on, which supports Flash up to version 9. People built tools to work with SWF files. Newgrounds created Swivel, which the studio I work at has been using a recent version of as the primary renderer for a hundred animators or so who are still using Flash Professional (Animate, now) to create TV shows for kids. JPEXS, mentioned in the article, is awesome. Flash files themselves - the ones with the .fla extension - are, at least after some version or another, mostly XML files packaged into a ZIP file.

So it's open-ish. Open enough to make this project do-able.
posted by clawsoon at 4:27 PM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Not Bill the Demon!
posted by duffell at 4:29 PM on July 31, 2018


Mozilla Shumway was another great attempt at an open source Flash player. It wasn't updated in two years, but some people are trying to improve it further.
posted by floatboth at 4:43 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I have been largely unproductive since the Fantastic Contraption post 10 years ago this month. Every once in a while it would lock up or be unavailable (or sold), and once in a while I would 'quit'.
But I just played an hour or so today (in the Unconnected Challenge- members only). I'll probably have to find something else to waste my time on.
posted by MtDewd at 4:44 PM on July 31, 2018


Thank you, Steve Jobs: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

This tragedy is why proprietary formats/runtimes are bad. If Apple hadn't kneecapped Flash in favor of open standards back in 2010, we'd be in a far worse pickle today.

(BTW, Flash Professional is now Adobe Animate, which outputs to standards-based formats. It can be used to convert legacy Flash content to HTML5.)
posted by ArmandoAkimbo at 4:49 PM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


To have all these games and other creative pieces destroyed because too many people used a proprietary format because it was the state of the art at the time and has since fallen out of favor - this is some serious dystopic shit.
posted by bile and syntax at 6:11 PM on July 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


Oh no! Homestuck!

Since Viz Media bought the rights last year, and moved Homestuck and Andrew Hussie's other MS Paint Adventures from their original website over to homestuck.com, there has been an effort to make sure that the flash elements are either converted to video, or in cases where interactivity was needed, to HTML5. There were a few glitches here and there, but there's actually a support contact where you can report them to Viz to be fixed.
posted by radwolf76 at 6:13 PM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


I hate you, infinitewindow.
posted by Reverend John at 8:55 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I am genuinely shocked to find that everyone did not hate Flash with fury.
posted by bongo_x at 10:41 PM on July 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


Flash for games and rich media interaction was great. Flash when it was used to get in the way of using a website (I'm looking at you 20 second long Flash intros) is what ruined it for everyone.
posted by like_neon at 2:16 AM on August 1, 2018 [3 favorites]


Huh, bongo_x? Flash games were short, often had incredible art and animation, and because they were simple to create, were often high on concept. What's not to love?
posted by agregoli at 5:43 AM on August 1, 2018


(Related posts alone, at the bottom of my mefi, is leading me to some GREAT posts about Flash games)
posted by agregoli at 5:44 AM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


All the beautiful, stupid nonsense from the turn of the millennium... All Your Base... Lobster Magnet... Hatt-Baby... all lost, like tears in rain.

If nothing else, just make sure to save Homestar Runner. That's all I ask.
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:52 AM on August 1, 2018 [2 favorites]


Oh man I just checked and Hatten ar din is safely on YouTube. But what about all the Weebl and Bobs?
posted by Mchelly at 5:59 AM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


Huh, I wonder what this does to all the content on Kongregate? (Kontent?)

I played the hell out of a shockwave flash game called "blix" back in the day. Got a wild hair to play it again a while ago and was dismayed to find it wasn't archived anyplace that I could locate...
posted by hearthpig at 9:07 AM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


Oh man I just checked and Hatten ar din is safely on YouTube.

"Safely". Hmm. Is YouTube any more of a public resource than all the proprietary Flash stuff was?
posted by clawsoon at 10:21 AM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


I hate you, infinitewindow.

The manticore is easily avoided if you watch for the right clues, Reverend John.
posted by infinitewindow at 10:56 AM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


Bill the Demon has a Flash port?! Why did nobody tell me?

I loved playing this on its previous obsolete platform. I think I have it in an old Mac emulator somewhere.
posted by confluency at 12:26 PM on August 1, 2018


First the Library of Alexandria, now meet 'n' fuck Flash games. Where does our cultural disintegration end?
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:01 PM on August 1, 2018


(I jest of course. There are plenty of great Flash games that I have thoroughly enjoyed and that are worthy of preserving.)
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:02 PM on August 1, 2018


« Older The Bad Idea That Keeps on Giving   |   Rethinking the Lorax, with facial analysis and... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments