13 ms·

Adobe Flash’s Gaming Legacy and My Efforts To Save It

255 points by bdz 8y ago

anchpop 8y ago
Imo this is an incredible project. I wasted thousands of hours playing flash games as a kid, glad to see someone is interested in preserving them
- simongr3dal 8y ago
  I also grew up spending a lot of time playing those games. I say good ridance to the flash video players, but seeing the screenshots of those games, it makes me pretty sad to think that so many of them might be going away.
krupan 8y ago
Let this be a warning to young developers tying into proprietary platforms. (Not one mention in TFA of http://homestarrunner.com http://homestarrunner.com, for shame)
- kevingadd 8y ago
  And open platforms, if browser vendors decide to break your content. Hard to say at this point whether HTML5 games will end up lasting any longer than Flash games did. Openness is valuable but you also just have to look at whether the platform owner(s) are going to stick around (Google isn't going anywhere, at least) and whether they have a long-term commitment to the products and APIs they put out there. HTML5 is starting to look like a churn nightmare between arbitrary changes to audio policy and major features getting shut off due to threats like Spectre. Adobe was a very bad platform steward regardless, but 5 years from now it may turn out that Win32 was a better choice in terms of developer investment/maintenance than HTML5 for many developers. iOS has had an incredible upkeep cost for indie game developers who released products on it early on, and we've seen many developers opt to pull games from the store instead of spend time+money updating them. Hopefully WebAssembly helps fix things here by providing a much cleaner compile target (with well-defined APIs) that has good performance. Moving to HTML5 had a major performance hit for people previously using Flash or Unity's plugin but most of that hit is gone once you use wasm.
- wvenable 8y ago
  That's not fair. There was a point in time that if you don't use flash for web games, you just weren't doing web games. HTML was not up to the task. You could avoid being tied to proprietary platforms now but there is a good chance you're just leaving the market to someone else.
  - sigjuice 8y ago
    Running another program in a rectangle in your web browser can hardly be called “web”.
    - hadrien01 8y ago
      You accessed it on the Web, in your Web browser. For pretty much everyone, that's the definition of "Web" .
    - kalleboo 8y ago
      Does WebAssembly running in a <canvas> tag count as "web"?
      - fooker 8y ago
        Maybe. However, wasm will eventually tightly integrate with the DOM.
        charlchi 8y ago
        Yeah it seems like people don't understand this. We've had an era of JavaScript dominating web standards. I also don't think people realize this is only the start of wasm...
- qiushihe 8y ago
  > proprietary platforms ... as in Windows, MacOS (to a much less extend), PlayStation, XBox, Switch (and/or other Nintendo platform)? This warning makes no sense.
  - greggman 8y ago
    how is MacOS to a much less extent?
    - qiushihe 8y ago
      Actually you're right... it isn't. I was thinking in term of player base size. But now that I think about it more, player base size makes no difference in the context of this conversation.
      - jimmaswell 8y ago
        is unix proprietary? macos is based on unix
        Laforet 8y ago
        No, but OSX certainly is. I doubt it's viable to write games without using any of the proprietary APIs.
        roblabla 8y ago
        You can write games just fine using OpenGL (and SDL for windowing/inputs/audio/etc).
        yoz-y 8y ago
        For now, but in the next version there will probably be no OpenGL support.
        8y ago
- rbosinger 8y ago
  This was the only good option at the time. One alternative was for people to pass .exe files around. That was a great way to spread viruses. Another alternative was Java applets which was a great way to lock up a browser. JavaScript didn't do shit in the the Netscape and IE 4/5 days. So was everyone supposed to make Windows games or just give up? Would that have been better?
- zwetan 8y ago
  Let this be a warning to young developers tying into browser platforms. For all the openness of web standards, let's remember that browsers are proprietary. If a browser vendor decide to do something (whatever it is, good or bad), there is pretty much nothing users or developers can do, we saw it with IE6 for a long time, we now see it with Google Chrome too. AFAIK browser plugins were considered part of those web standards (see [0] and [1]) [0]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/infrastructure.html#plugins https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/infrastructure.html#p... [1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/system-state.html#plugins-2 https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/system-state.html#plu...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
bdz 8y ago
Here is the latest dump with almost 4000 titles https://archive.org/details/Flashpoint3.3.zip https://archive.org/details/Flashpoint3.3.zip
shmerl 8y ago
Mozilla tried with Shumway project, but it got abandoned.
ravenstine 8y ago
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. 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. Here it is in all its 1999 glory: https://web.archive.org/web/20031017000018/http://www.disney.co.uk:80/gadget/repair.html https://web.archive.org/web/20031017000018/http://www.disney... 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.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  https://get.adobe.com/shockwave/ https://get.adobe.com/shockwave/ is allegedly still a thing that exists and that you can install if you have Windows. It says it works on Windows 7 and 8, IE, and Firefox. My guess is that they haven't updated that, and it'll no longer work on Firefox since Quantum, but it's likely some flavor of IE will work with you there. And my guess is it'll work on Windows 10 with IE, since most things that work on 8 work fine on 10.
  - tomysshadow 8y ago
    Actually, it's still being updated, but only on Windows. Director (the authoring tool used to create Shockwave Movies) was discontinued, but Shockwave was not.
    - ravenstine 8y ago
      I wonder how it feels to work updates for software that nobody is using and has no future. That's got to suck.
keymone 8y ago
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. Edit: missing word
- coldacid 8y ago
  In hindsight, sure. But it was perfect (or as close as you could get) for the time it was created.
gnusci 8y ago
This guy rocks!!! LOL
nneonneo 8y ago
It's a damn shame that HTML5 implementations of Flash, like Shumway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software)) and Swiffy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Swiffy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Swiffy) 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. And in case anyone is still in doubt about Flash's security woes - take a gander at the Flash CVE page at https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p.... 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 two months ago. 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.
- myfonj 8y ago
  For those eager to directly witness some SWF running in JavaScript: http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/examples/racing/ http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/examples/racing/ (via aforementioned https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/ https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/ ) http://gordonjs.s3.amazonaws.com/trip.html http://gordonjs.s3.amazonaws.com/trip.html (via https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon/wiki https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon/wiki ) https://google-developers.appspot.com/swiffy/showcase/snake_afc48e2efc7dc4d4a7e6c221da976505.frame?hl=en https://google-developers.appspot.com/swiffy/showcase/snake_... (not reading SWF directly but running converted script; via https://developers.google.com/swiffy/showcase/ https://developers.google.com/swiffy/showcase/ )
- clouddrover 8y ago
  > I would have thought running SWFs in the JS sandbox would be a good way to get the compatibility of Flash And these days a WebAssembly build of Flash player would be an even better way, but it would depend on Adobe being willing to spend the time and the money to do it.
  - azakai 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
JasonFruit 8y ago
From the article: 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 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, purchase it from the owner, 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.
- llasram 8y ago
  Say you somehow have advance knowledge of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Is it legal to steal as many books as you can from the Library prior? Of course not. Is this the only way to save unique volumes from irrevocable destruction when you have no way to convince the librarians of its imminent fate, or even to contact them at all? Yes.
  - JasonFruit 8y ago
    And then return them to the owner once the emergency is over? Yes. I don't see that happening here. What you describe is an emergency response; what's happening here looks like looting. (Edit: soften what could be read as an outright accusation.)
    - mcphage 8y ago
      > And then return them to the owner once the emergency is over? Yes. I don't see that happening here. The emergency is very far from over, they’ve only just begun the salvaging operation.
      - JasonFruit 8y ago
        To clarify, I should have said, "I don't foresee that happening here." I predict, based on the attitudes the article expressed, that the writer has little interest in the owners of these games, and even less interest in their rights.
exgamedev 8y ago
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
lxe 8y ago
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.
- exgamedev 8y ago
  It all moved to mobile. The audience, the devs, the marketing money, all of it. There's 100x more lotto ticket buyers on mobile than there ever were Flash devs which obscures it; but every Flash dev moved on to mobile or simply moved on from games. You could release the perfect canvas game engine tomorrow and if Unity didn't port to it not a single game dev would build a company around it
- IshKebab 8y ago
  Flash was good for games, and sure we don't really have anything comparable yet. But that is irrelevant. The reason it was killed is because it was mostly used for video and it was really awful at that. Especially on mobile.
- mhenr18 8y ago
  I hope by smooth you're referring to the graphics being vector vs bitmap, because Flash performed really badly once you added any kind of complexity to a scene. (edit: simple things worked brilliantly though, and often that was enough.) The key innovation of Flash was and still is the creation side of things in Flash Pro rather than the runtime. My main experience was with Line Rider. I didn't create it, but I became involved in the community and started making tweaked versions with tools that made it easier to create tracks (as opposed to versions that let you do things like change the physics or the rider). Every line you added to a track caused a new MovieClip to be added to the scene that had a line drawn in it. By the time you had around 3,000 lines or so you'd start to get reduced framerates. 3,000 lines sounds like a lot, but is tiny when you consider tracks that have accompanying artwork. A few years ago, we released a JS + WebGL rewrite of Line Rider that has a physics engine that's bug-for-bug compatible with the original (you can play it at https://www.linerider.com/ https://www.linerider.com/ if you're interested - sorry if that's too self promotional). With access to WebGL and a massively faster ECMAScript runtime, the JS version runs multiple orders of magnitude faster than the original Flash version. It's now possible to work with tracks that have hundreds of thousands of lines without experiencing frame rate drops as opposed to just a few thousand lines. So as for web platform tech underperforming from a runtime point of view, I disagree. The problem is that all the ingredients are there to make something great, but the developer effort required is monumental in comparison to how fast it was to make something work with Flash Pro.
jdonaldson 8y ago
For those of you involved in saving flash projects, consider Haxe and OpenFL : https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/ http://www.openfl.org/ http://www.openfl.org/ Case Studies: https://haxe.org/blog/tivo-using-haxe-to-improve-user-experience-for-millions-of-customers/ https://haxe.org/blog/tivo-using-haxe-to-improve-user-experi... https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/12/flowplay-overhauls-vegas-world-ditches-adobe-flash-for-haxe/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/12/flowplay-overhauls-vegas-...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
mintplant 8y ago
To capture more than just the SWF: - Load the game into a real web browser and let it run for a bit - Intercept all network requests with a caching proxy - Save the external resources loaded to disk 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.
- tomysshadow 8y ago
  There's an excellent command line application called Auto Saving Sniffer which can be found here (ignoring the rather crude abbreviated name.) https://www.cockos.com/assniffer/ https://www.cockos.com/assniffer/ While you need to play through the entire game to be sure you have all of it, this is a big time save, though with the downside it doesn't work over HTTPS. It's also possible to use a Fiddler script to accomplish something similar, which defeats the HTTPS problem.
- snowpanda 8y ago
  I like this idea, but (and I know barely anything about games) then I wonder that maybe the resources for lets say the final level of a game are not included, if you let it idle only on the first level, no?
endgame 8y ago
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.
yosefzeev 8y ago
One could ask is the attempt to save lost games, or lost innocence?
- jplayer01 8y ago
  It's about saving cultural goods. The worst thing about the modern age is how transient and impermanent data is. In 100 years, the past 30 years will be effectively a big black hole for anybody interested in studying our culture and civilization.
ducttape12 8y ago
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. 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?

255 points by bdz 8y ago

Imo this is an incredible project. I wasted thousands of hours playing flash games as a kid, glad to see someone is interested in preserving them

simongr3dal 8y ago
I also grew up spending a lot of time playing those games. I say good ridance to the flash video players, but seeing the screenshots of those games, it makes me pretty sad to think that so many of them might be going away.

krupan 8y ago

Let this be a warning to young developers tying into proprietary platforms. (Not one mention in TFA of http://homestarrunner.com http://homestarrunner.com, for shame)

kevingadd 8y ago
And open platforms, if browser vendors decide to break your content. Hard to say at this point whether HTML5 games will end up lasting any longer than Flash games did. Openness is valuable but you also just have to look at whether the platform owner(s) are going to stick around (Google isn't going anywhere, at least) and whether they have a long-term commitment to the products and APIs they put out there. HTML5 is starting to look like a churn nightmare between arbitrary changes to audio policy and major features getting shut off due to threats like Spectre. Adobe was a very bad platform steward regardless, but 5 years from now it may turn out that Win32 was a better choice in terms of developer investment/maintenance than HTML5 for many developers. iOS has had an incredible upkeep cost for indie game developers who released products on it early on, and we've seen many developers opt to pull games from the store instead of spend time+money updating them. Hopefully WebAssembly helps fix things here by providing a much cleaner compile target (with well-defined APIs) that has good performance. Moving to HTML5 had a major performance hit for people previously using Flash or Unity's plugin but most of that hit is gone once you use wasm.
wvenable 8y ago
That's not fair. There was a point in time that if you don't use flash for web games, you just weren't doing web games. HTML was not up to the task. You could avoid being tied to proprietary platforms now but there is a good chance you're just leaving the market to someone else.
- sigjuice 8y ago
  Running another program in a rectangle in your web browser can hardly be called “web”.
  - hadrien01 8y ago
    You accessed it on the Web, in your Web browser. For pretty much everyone, that's the definition of "Web" .
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    Does WebAssembly running in a <canvas> tag count as "web"?
    - fooker 8y ago
      Maybe. However, wasm will eventually tightly integrate with the DOM.
      - charlchi 8y ago
        Yeah it seems like people don't understand this. We've had an era of JavaScript dominating web standards. I also don't think people realize this is only the start of wasm...
qiushihe 8y ago
> proprietary platforms ... as in Windows, MacOS (to a much less extend), PlayStation, XBox, Switch (and/or other Nintendo platform)? This warning makes no sense.
- greggman 8y ago
  how is MacOS to a much less extent?
  - qiushihe 8y ago
    Actually you're right... it isn't. I was thinking in term of player base size. But now that I think about it more, player base size makes no difference in the context of this conversation.
    - jimmaswell 8y ago
      is unix proprietary? macos is based on unix
      - Laforet 8y ago
        No, but OSX certainly is. I doubt it's viable to write games without using any of the proprietary APIs.
        roblabla 8y ago
        You can write games just fine using OpenGL (and SDL for windowing/inputs/audio/etc).
        yoz-y 8y ago
        For now, but in the next version there will probably be no OpenGL support.
        8y ago
rbosinger 8y ago
This was the only good option at the time. One alternative was for people to pass .exe files around. That was a great way to spread viruses. Another alternative was Java applets which was a great way to lock up a browser. JavaScript didn't do shit in the the Netscape and IE 4/5 days. So was everyone supposed to make Windows games or just give up? Would that have been better?
zwetan 8y ago
Let this be a warning to young developers tying into browser platforms. For all the openness of web standards, let's remember that browsers are proprietary. If a browser vendor decide to do something (whatever it is, good or bad), there is pretty much nothing users or developers can do, we saw it with IE6 for a long time, we now see it with Google Chrome too. AFAIK browser plugins were considered part of those web standards (see [0] and [1]) [0]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/infrastructure.html#plugins https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/infrastructure.html#p... [1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/system-state.html#plugins-2 https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/system-state.html#plu...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

bdz 8y ago

Here is the latest dump with almost 4000 titles https://archive.org/details/Flashpoint3.3.zip https://archive.org/details/Flashpoint3.3.zip

shmerl 8y ago

Mozilla tried with Shumway project, but it got abandoned.

ravenstine 8y ago

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. 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. Here it is in all its 1999 glory: https://web.archive.org/web/20031017000018/http://www.disney.co.uk:80/gadget/repair.html https://web.archive.org/web/20031017000018/http://www.disney... 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.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
https://get.adobe.com/shockwave/ https://get.adobe.com/shockwave/ is allegedly still a thing that exists and that you can install if you have Windows. It says it works on Windows 7 and 8, IE, and Firefox. My guess is that they haven't updated that, and it'll no longer work on Firefox since Quantum, but it's likely some flavor of IE will work with you there. And my guess is it'll work on Windows 10 with IE, since most things that work on 8 work fine on 10.
- tomysshadow 8y ago
  Actually, it's still being updated, but only on Windows. Director (the authoring tool used to create Shockwave Movies) was discontinued, but Shockwave was not.
  - ravenstine 8y ago
    I wonder how it feels to work updates for software that nobody is using and has no future. That's got to suck.

keymone 8y ago

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. Edit: missing word

coldacid 8y ago
In hindsight, sure. But it was perfect (or as close as you could get) for the time it was created.

gnusci 8y ago

This guy rocks!!! LOL

nneonneo 8y ago

It's a damn shame that HTML5 implementations of Flash, like Shumway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software)) and Swiffy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Swiffy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Swiffy) 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. And in case anyone is still in doubt about Flash's security woes - take a gander at the Flash CVE page at https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p.... 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 two months ago. 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.

myfonj 8y ago
For those eager to directly witness some SWF running in JavaScript: http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/examples/racing/ http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/examples/racing/ (via aforementioned https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/ https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/ ) http://gordonjs.s3.amazonaws.com/trip.html http://gordonjs.s3.amazonaws.com/trip.html (via https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon/wiki https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon/wiki ) https://google-developers.appspot.com/swiffy/showcase/snake_afc48e2efc7dc4d4a7e6c221da976505.frame?hl=en https://google-developers.appspot.com/swiffy/showcase/snake_... (not reading SWF directly but running converted script; via https://developers.google.com/swiffy/showcase/ https://developers.google.com/swiffy/showcase/ )
clouddrover 8y ago
> I would have thought running SWFs in the JS sandbox would be a good way to get the compatibility of Flash And these days a WebAssembly build of Flash player would be an even better way, but it would depend on Adobe being willing to spend the time and the money to do it.
- azakai 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

JasonFruit 8y ago

From the article: 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 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, purchase it from the owner, 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.

llasram 8y ago
Say you somehow have advance knowledge of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Is it legal to steal as many books as you can from the Library prior? Of course not. Is this the only way to save unique volumes from irrevocable destruction when you have no way to convince the librarians of its imminent fate, or even to contact them at all? Yes.
- JasonFruit 8y ago
  And then return them to the owner once the emergency is over? Yes. I don't see that happening here. What you describe is an emergency response; what's happening here looks like looting. (Edit: soften what could be read as an outright accusation.)
  - mcphage 8y ago
    > And then return them to the owner once the emergency is over? Yes. I don't see that happening here. The emergency is very far from over, they’ve only just begun the salvaging operation.
    - JasonFruit 8y ago
      To clarify, I should have said, "I don't foresee that happening here." I predict, based on the attitudes the article expressed, that the writer has little interest in the owners of these games, and even less interest in their rights.

exgamedev 8y ago

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

lxe 8y ago

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.

exgamedev 8y ago
It all moved to mobile. The audience, the devs, the marketing money, all of it. There's 100x more lotto ticket buyers on mobile than there ever were Flash devs which obscures it; but every Flash dev moved on to mobile or simply moved on from games. You could release the perfect canvas game engine tomorrow and if Unity didn't port to it not a single game dev would build a company around it
IshKebab 8y ago
Flash was good for games, and sure we don't really have anything comparable yet. But that is irrelevant. The reason it was killed is because it was mostly used for video and it was really awful at that. Especially on mobile.
mhenr18 8y ago
I hope by smooth you're referring to the graphics being vector vs bitmap, because Flash performed really badly once you added any kind of complexity to a scene. (edit: simple things worked brilliantly though, and often that was enough.) The key innovation of Flash was and still is the creation side of things in Flash Pro rather than the runtime. My main experience was with Line Rider. I didn't create it, but I became involved in the community and started making tweaked versions with tools that made it easier to create tracks (as opposed to versions that let you do things like change the physics or the rider). Every line you added to a track caused a new MovieClip to be added to the scene that had a line drawn in it. By the time you had around 3,000 lines or so you'd start to get reduced framerates. 3,000 lines sounds like a lot, but is tiny when you consider tracks that have accompanying artwork. A few years ago, we released a JS + WebGL rewrite of Line Rider that has a physics engine that's bug-for-bug compatible with the original (you can play it at https://www.linerider.com/ https://www.linerider.com/ if you're interested - sorry if that's too self promotional). With access to WebGL and a massively faster ECMAScript runtime, the JS version runs multiple orders of magnitude faster than the original Flash version. It's now possible to work with tracks that have hundreds of thousands of lines without experiencing frame rate drops as opposed to just a few thousand lines. So as for web platform tech underperforming from a runtime point of view, I disagree. The problem is that all the ingredients are there to make something great, but the developer effort required is monumental in comparison to how fast it was to make something work with Flash Pro.

jdonaldson 8y ago

For those of you involved in saving flash projects, consider Haxe and OpenFL : https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/ http://www.openfl.org/ http://www.openfl.org/ Case Studies: https://haxe.org/blog/tivo-using-haxe-to-improve-user-experience-for-millions-of-customers/ https://haxe.org/blog/tivo-using-haxe-to-improve-user-experi... https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/12/flowplay-overhauls-vegas-world-ditches-adobe-flash-for-haxe/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/12/flowplay-overhauls-vegas-...

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mintplant 8y ago

To capture more than just the SWF: - Load the game into a real web browser and let it run for a bit - Intercept all network requests with a caching proxy - Save the external resources loaded to disk 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.

tomysshadow 8y ago
There's an excellent command line application called Auto Saving Sniffer which can be found here (ignoring the rather crude abbreviated name.) https://www.cockos.com/assniffer/ https://www.cockos.com/assniffer/ While you need to play through the entire game to be sure you have all of it, this is a big time save, though with the downside it doesn't work over HTTPS. It's also possible to use a Fiddler script to accomplish something similar, which defeats the HTTPS problem.
snowpanda 8y ago
I like this idea, but (and I know barely anything about games) then I wonder that maybe the resources for lets say the final level of a game are not included, if you let it idle only on the first level, no?

endgame 8y ago

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.

yosefzeev 8y ago

One could ask is the attempt to save lost games, or lost innocence?

jplayer01 8y ago
It's about saving cultural goods. The worst thing about the modern age is how transient and impermanent data is. In 100 years, the past 30 years will be effectively a big black hole for anybody interested in studying our culture and civilization.

ducttape12 8y ago

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. 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?