44 ms·

Kongregate closed to new games, shutting down forums and chat

302 points by teej 6y ago

ljp_206 6y ago
As a kid, Kongregate was a safe, inclusive space for high-quality games that I didn't have to fear would mess up a family member's computer. It looks like that much hasn't changed a lot, which is great. Sites like this played a large part in increasing my bravery and familiarity on the web, on which I now earn my living.
- sodaplayer 6y ago
  Yeah, Kongregate was also one of my first chatroom experiences as a kid. The community had many friendly people, and now as an adult, it's nice looking back and feeling I had a good environment to learn how to interact on the web. It also inspired me to learn Actionscript to try to make my own Flash games, which eventually lead to me now with a CS degree.
- maerF0x0 6y ago
  > that I didn't have to fear would mess up a family member's computer Save for having flash enabled . Hard to believe they've validated all 128,000 games.
  - tkzed49 6y ago
    To be more realistic, Flash was a much smaller attack surface than downloading and running random executables. I'm guessing that a fairly small number of kids were actually subject to Flash exploits while playing games on Kongregate. Compare that to downloading a screensaver...
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      I don’t see the difference between running a Flash app with no sand boxing whatsoever and a random executable.
      - rictic 6y ago
        Security is a continuum, not a binary. Things that native apps can do trivially but that require explicit permission for accessed in Flash (or the web in general): filesystem read/write, listen in on microphones, spy with webcams, etc etc. If you have a flash zero day (and they totally exist!), you can do those things, but that significantly raises the difficulty, which reduces the number of attacks you'll actually see in the wild. Most attackers aren't the NSA or Mossad, and resources that they have to spend on getting and exploiting zero days are resources they can't spend on other parts of the exploit chain.
      - geofft 6y ago
        The Flash API surface does not include direct host access the way the native application API surface does. That means that while identifying native apps doing "bad things" requires solving the halting problem (and moral philosophy), any ability of Flash applets to do "bad things" is an unambiguous bug. Sure, without a sandbox those bugs are easy to exploit when they exist, but they can nonetheless be fixed. I wouldn't trust Flash from 2005 against NSO Group from 2020, but I'd certainly trust it against the author of the Melissa virus. Another way of putting this is that there are two senses of "sandboxed" - one is having a limited API surface and one is using software fault isolation techniques on the interpreter/runtime itself. Flash (and JS) always had the former, even though the latter is fairly recent.
- bitL 6y ago
  Send them some love then (i.e. $) to help them out.
jgeralnik 6y ago
I spent middle school hacking games on Kongregate to obtain badges and high scores. There were incredible tools available for hacking flash games - debuggers, decompilers, cheat engine like tools. Most of the tools were dedicated to kongregate games and allowed easy interfacing with the website. Years later I tried to remember exactly what tools I had used and what communities I participated in and was never able to find them. Anyone else do the same and have a better recollection of the tools you used?
- hyper_reality 6y ago
  Yes! That's how I spent a lot of my spare time too in adolescence. There was a forum called Kongrehack run by a Swedish guy where game-hacks were shared. Initially we used Cheat Engine to modify select memory locations in games, but the game creators came up with better defences to obscure the easy hacks. Somebody created an entire browser - called something like Niflheim but I can't remember the exact name - designed for the purpose of cheating Kongregate APIs. Finally, a subversive guy found a way to submit directly to the "I have won a badge API" and wrote a program to submit all the badges in batch. This took the fun out of winning achievements in games, but introduced many of us to the world of coding, automation, and hacking. Why grind for hours when you can cheat the scoreboard in seconds? I also developed a way to cheat on Kongai, which was one of my favourite games on Kongregate. However I got bored and moved onto other things in life shortly after. If you were active in this community around 2008, we probably talked to each other back then.
  - nextaccountic 6y ago
    Is this the forum? https://konghack.com/ https://konghack.com/
    - hyper_reality 6y ago
      I don't think so, that website looks a lot newer. And I'm pretty sure the original was called KongreHack or KongregateHack.
  - jgeralnik 6y ago
sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago
It feels sort of sad to see this website go. It still reminds me of the kingdom rush games I played a few years ago.
- zornthewise 6y ago
  You can get them in mobile for like a dollar each and they are just as good if my memory is anything to go by!
  - savanaly 6y ago
    Also available on Steam which is where I first played them.
arusahni 6y ago
The community was great - I still talk to some of the folks from the chat rooms I used to mod. I loved the dev community that sprung up around the site, too, with useful userscripts and assistant apps. End of an era. Thanks for all the memories, Kongregate.
- _1100 6y ago
  I kick myself sometimes for not being around when they cut down on chat rooms and I never got reconnect with anyone in Ninja chat. Jeez I was so young, I’d just log in to kongregate, type “i liek ninjas” because that was how people knew I was at my keyboard, and then spend the whole day playing flash games. I did this hundreds of times over many years, took a break during college, and when I came back they’d culled down the number of chat rooms. Guess I’m just replying to vent, and to also say thanks for all the good times, Kongregate.
at_a_remove 6y ago
I was never big on Flash games but I did enjoy one on Kongregate: a card-based game inspired heavily by the various works of H.P. Lovecraft. I get it, Flash is buggy and second in being a security mistake only to PDFs. Still, it's a shame these little games will be forgotten, swept aside.
mrkramer 6y ago
I never played a video game on Kongregate because when I was interested in browser games Miniclip was number 1 in Europe. I think browser games kinda died when smartphones came around because you got better experience when playing a game naively than in a smartphone browser. But I think browser games technology is better than ever and there are a lot of opportunities to explore in that industry.
javajosh 6y ago
Some of the best games (and game ideas) I've ever seen, bar none, were on Kongregate. Flash (and particularly later versions of ActionScript) were just so good for this kind of programming, and really, even the modern web hasn't caught up yet. Looking forward though to the next iteration which is HTML5 based...
- slimsag 6y ago
  I am going to miss this a lot, too. I don't think the "next big thing" here will be HTML5, though. Unity is _ridiculously_ easy and has led to large swaths of indie games on Steam - people don't quite understand just how easy it is to make games in Unity these days. You can pass without understanding coding at all to a large extent, and reminds me a _lot_ of working in Flash. If you don't believe me, look up Sam Hogan on YouTube - or search YouTube for "unity game in 24h". I'm not saying these are all good - but it reminds me a _lot_ of how Flash enabled rapid development of game ideas.
  - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    Is this an ad? Not only you mention a single engine, you also sell it as super easy. The reality is that making good games is extremely hard, and has always been. Unity is not the first game framework, there have been many along the years. Flash being one of them (while not even designed for that originally!). Some of them are easier, some are more featureful, some have better graphics, some are specialized into a genre etc. While some genres need almost no code, others are full of pages of tricky game logic. And that is without counting into account the engine code. Further, Unity had nothing to do with Steam being flooded. The actual reason is that 1- Valve pivoted into being a distribution platform, 2- they stopped curating what goes in, 3- gaming exploded and became way more mainstream (along with streaming, e-sports and programming, all which helped a lot), and 4- people started making money selling courses, degrees and content on how to make games.
    - dang 6y ago
      You broke the site guidelines here. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? Note that they ask people not to post insinuations about astroturfing or shilling. Your comment is great without that first bit.
Kiro 6y ago
How did games work on Kongregate? Did people makes games specifically for the platform with their APIs?
- ars 6y ago
  Typically they would have an existing game and then integrate the APIs into the game. You didn't have to do that, You could still upload your game without it. It was just if you wanted a chance of getting badged. And badged games had way more plays. So there was a lot of incentive to do it.
derivagral 6y ago
Funny timing; I was considering whether I wanted to use their platform to try a concept or two and get "free" social support, but now I suppose I'll have to figure out handling that on my own. Also wonder how much of this is business/cost optimization vs user-generated liability.
Sniffnoy 6y ago
Man, I just hope someone can somehow bring back Kongai (and fix the remaining bugs). That game was amazing; it was just a poor fit for what it was used for. (A difficult competitive game used as a sitewide metagame on a site full of quick casual games...? What were they thinking? But the game was amazing! There's just not really any good way to play it anymore.)
chillwaves 6y ago
Browser based games are better than ever. Wonder where it will go next. My favorite, which was acquired by Kongregate in Dec 2019: https://surviv.io https://surviv.io 2D Last Man Standing. Great fun.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Capabilities are better, thanks to WebGL and modern JavaScript - and no proprietary tooling is needed, but the overall barrier for entry now is much higher: during the heyday of Flash any teenager could put together something silly, adapt, learn, improve, and beyond. You can’t do that anymore because there is no good, well-supported, code-free way of making art and animations without writing any code for HTML5+Canvas. None of the kids that got started by making silly animations in Flash back in 1999-2007 could do that today: there is no paintbrush tool for the web.
  - sp332 6y ago
    Adobe Animate (previously Flash Professional CC) added an HTML5 export button in mid-2018.
    - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      I understand that Flash's HTML5 support requires a Flash document to created from scratch to support HTML5 and it doesn't support the same features as SWF - but I might be wrong. UPDATE: Yeah, Adobe's document here says that many features aren't supported by their HTML5 export feature: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-html5-canvas-document.html https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-ht...
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  > Browser based games are better than ever. I disagree, browser based games took a very hard hit after Flash was killed and the infrastructure that was built around these games died. Newgrounds might be still limping around, but pretty much everything else, like Kongregate now, has died and nothing replaced it (most of the sponsors that funded these games moved to mobile, but very few of the actual developers did and mobile games are very different than the more raw/brutal flash games you'd find on pretty much every flash gaming site out there). The tech, from a purely technical and capabilities perspective, is better sure. But the ecosystem and tools are much worse.
ianai 6y ago
So what happened to this site? Did people move onto something else (a site) or was it smartphones?
- ars 6y ago
  It was killed by Flash. Adobe is not just going to stop updating flash, they are outright force disabling it at the end of the year, even for people willing to risk it. This kills the majority of the games on Kongregate.
  - 8note 6y ago
    And thus shockwave, with its .exe outputs wins in the end for old games?
    - hobs 6y ago
      Eh, you can still run a flash decompiler and recompile it to an exe (which embeds the flash player) https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-decompiler https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-decompiler
dvaun 6y ago
There are still old places like Stickpage[0] and Newgrounds[1] that are up. They feel like relics from the early web before mass consolidation onto social networks like MySpace took place. [0]: https://www.stickpage.com/ https://www.stickpage.com/ [1]: https://www.newgrounds.com/ https://www.newgrounds.com/
- legohead 6y ago
  https://armorgames.com/ https://armorgames.com/
  - inglor 6y ago
    I grew up in Newgrounds and helped Dan set up ArmorGames and ran some of their contests. It was a lot of fun and a super creative space.
    - gotostatement 6y ago
      omg inglor! I remember your name was a meme back when I was in the newgrounds forums learning how to make games. I remember you had a contest(?) or were just helping people learn how to make games only using the drawing API without any hand-drawn assets. thank you!! :)
    - cableshaft 6y ago
      waves Hi! I made what I'm pretty sure was the first game for ArmorGames, in fact it was still branded GamesOfGondor, since he originally wanted to commission all LOTR-themed games. Dan was a really nice guy, very friendly and enthusiastic. Wish I had done more with him in retrospect, but the artist I was working with suddenly lost interest while working on the second game, and things kinda fell apart. The first game is still up on Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/210883 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/210883
      - inglor 6y ago
        Hey, I remember you! Good times! I was also involved in the GoG days but I didn't think people remembered that. It changed pretty quickly due to legal reasons.
JohnDeHope 6y ago
I was literally just starting to surf their dev pages to get back into some very light HTML game design. I don’t have nearly enough time to make an actual game with an actual game engine. But I’m a professional web developer so I can smack HTML around with a little bit of JavaScript no problem. Now I’m not sure what to do. Is https://ldjam.com/ https://ldjam.com/ the new home for this sort of thing? Newgrounds?
- lewispollard 6y ago
  Itch.io game jams. Check out Phaser.js, a javascript WebGL games framework, it's dead easy if you know a little JS.
- sp332 6y ago
  Check out A-Frame or an authoring tool built on it. It's very HTML-oriented.
ars 6y ago
Reading between the lines it seems they can not handle the volume of spam they are getting. (Many forums going read-only, and chat rooms shutting down.)
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  Sounds more like they're trying to gently kick the community out, because they're shutting down the site-as-we-know-it. Gently, because Kongregate is still pretty cool.
JeanMarcS 6y ago
But, but, but... How will I get my badge of the day ? All those shiny konpanions I collected for years ? Kongregate is still in my morning ritual, and some new games are still a lot of fun and enjoyable. I guess they want to concentrate themselves on their new kartridge product (not working on Linux...). But I find this announcement surprising (closing chat) as they just added a new (and, well, not very useful) feature to it. Strange. But I hope they’ll have great time in their new adventures.
- ars 6y ago
  I'm in the same boat :( I have every single Shiny Kongpanion there is, have not missed a single one. I have around 70% of the badges on the site. In a way, no more badges means I might actually get to 100 (yah right :) - except that with flash breaking probably 90% of the games at the end of the year, there's not really a whole lot of time left to do that.
- Mathnerd314 6y ago
  I lost interest once I hit the level cap, level 65. Although they did raise it, there's little reason to chase after imaginary internet points. The Kongpanions were supposed to be used in games but after a few weeks I had enough Kongpanions to saturate any game that used them. Again, more imaginary internet points.
atcg0101 6y ago
I wonder if this is the beginning of Kongregate's integration and deployment of Forte powered features: https://blog.kongregate.com/kongregate-announces-partnership-with-forte/ https://blog.kongregate.com/kongregate-announces-partnership...
- ars 6y ago
  They already delivered something with Forte. You earn "blocks" now for getting the weekly kongpanion. You were supposed to be able to exchange them for chat stickers. The launch was a disaster, partly breaking the site for 2 days, and they had to disable the stickers. And without chat, I don't see much point in the stickers. (Maybe they'll find something else to do with the blocks, stickers were never that interesting to me anyway.) In a way you can say that rather than the beginning, Forte actually killed Kongregate, probably by draining developer time and budget.
  - atcg0101 6y ago
    I did not know that they already had started with a public roll out of Forte powered features. Thanks for the added insight!
JoshTriplett 6y ago
For people looking for alternatives, try https://www.reddit.com/r/WebGames/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WebGames/ , which specifically lists games that can be played within a browser.
whereistimbo 6y ago
my fav games on kongregate: https://archive.vn/pPJwB https://archive.vn/pPJwB
- whereistimbo 6y ago
  web.archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20200701213611/https://www.kongregate.com/accounts/whereistimbo/favorites https://web.archive.org/web/20200701213611/https://www.kongr...
  - whereistimbo 6y ago
    https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Gik0oLzvfLI3Vb58dOkBPqpWoKYDtQ/mDO-uGaVGZQ https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Gik0oLzvfLI3Vb58dO... my google collection of article https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Yvht3mJiT6aaJJQbQGA9oA/cyCVhmLaHAY https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Yvht3mJiT6aaJJQbQG... my google collection of later plan
ckocagil 6y ago
People said Flash wouldn't be missed. People said WebGL and canvas would bring us a much better experience. It's been nearly a decade since Steve Jobs declared war on Flash. Where has the entire browser gaming ecosystem gone to? Kongregate had some of the most original games I've ever played. Kongregate shutting down doesn't just sadden me, it infuriates me: all vendors had to do was to sandbox Flash (which Chrome did!) and not autoplay it. Instead everyone followed the lead of an arrogant jerk who obviously knew everything better than everyone. Communities like Kongregate, Armorgames, Newgrounds will never exist again. There will never be another War of the Web.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  Flash was absolutely atrocious from a technical standpoint. It had to go. We had to adapt to better things. It's not that webgl isn't capable. It's that the market for in browser flash like games has diminished when you can now play AAA games in the browser. The market has changed. And sadly that doesn't mean every single person doesn't want them anymore. Just that the majority don't.
  - devwastaken 6y ago
    It was atrocious but there was much better tooling behind it that made it all make sense. I just wish flash would have been stripped down into a web only version that was safe and only for things like flash games.
  - Octopodes 6y ago
    >It had to go. We had to adapt to better things. I'm sorry, I don't understand why. If someone develops a fun little game in Flash, and then I play it on Kongregate, what harm has been done?
    - somethingwitty1 6y ago
      Because flash was a plugin, not locked to that one little game. Once you install it, every website could use it. A lot was done, by browsers, over the years to try and give more control to the end-user, but Adobe didn't have too much interest. They were the dominate player, what other option was there!? Countless security vulnerabilities (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...), siphoning personal data back to Adobe, etc. Looking today at what some companies are doing to harvest data, one could say they were just ahead of their time...
Causality1 6y ago
If they want to become a mainstream game developer, gutting an established fanbase and community seems counterproductive.
jpt4 6y ago
The Immortal Grand Prix flash game from 2003 [0] was the single best turn based tactics game I've yet encountered online. Does anyone know whether it is still hosted somewhere, how one might self host Flash games (assuming one had the Shockwave files), or of games comparable to this one? [0] https://youtu.be/VGxhmhNJ9qo https://youtu.be/VGxhmhNJ9qo
madrox 6y ago
End of an era. Browser gaming is a shadow of its former glory. Many of the best mobile games started as flash games here. Then Steve Jobs declared war on Flash and made in-app purchase games possible. Now casual games are the pay-to-win nonsense you see on the App Store. If free markets are truly what is best for consumers, then casual gaming isn’t a free market.
dlbucci 6y ago
I remember joining there when they announced they would have medals (Xbox 360 achievements had just become a thing, and were big). Played a lot of great games and had some fun chatting, too! But the one I maybe think of the most is Desktop Tower Defense (1.5, maybe?), as it was all the rage when I joined. Christ, that was 13 years ago! Gonna have to revisit that soon, I suppose...
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
> Certain ... forums ... will be removed from the site I no longer contribute to any forums because of stuff like this. There were various forums I’ve contributed to over the years — sometimes posting thousands of times over 5-10 years. Then the forum is migrated to new software (losing all user accounts or posts), or shutdown for good. Mozilla did this several times. Why bother spending the time to contribute towards an online community when your credibility in that community can be removed when new management comes in and decides to change forum software or shutdown forums altogether? I imagine it’s how Yahoo Groups people felt. Even my posting to HR is limited to stuff that I guess will be gone one day. Nothing lasts forever.
- SenoraRaton 6y ago
  Is not the post you just posted on a "forum" A rose by any other name is still a rose.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    Yep. And read my comment about HN at the end.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      I think you mistyped it as "HR".
- aetherspawn 6y ago
  This is true of a game development community that I made about 2500 contributions to (had a goal of making 5-6 meaningful posts per day). They migrated their software and the accounts became unlinked to the previous contributions. In the last 7 years, I contributed only 40 more times.
- mtrower 6y ago
  > Why bother spending the time to contribute towards an online community when your credibility in that community can be removed when new management comes in and decides to change forum software or shutdown forums altogether? How about for the impact you had during the time it was active? I don't know what your contributions were, but if they were that prolific, then surely they were of service. Shutdowns are always a blow, and I don't intend to tell you want to do with your valuable time. But hopefully you can see more value in your contributions than only what they may have meant in the future.
KiDD 6y ago
Oooof. I Loved Kongregate Games!
smrk007 6y ago
How feasible would it be to clone the entirety of the website? (Scrape games, recreate all functionality, etc.)
frenchie4111 6y ago
RIP. I got my start in software engineering building and publishing (crappy) games to Kongregate. It was a wonderful site, and it will be missed.
Rotdhizon 6y ago
This is upsetting to see but not surprising. As a daily Kong user, the website has been going downhill hard over the past decade. Especially over these last 3-5 years, it's been a wasteland of terrible quality games. In it's early days, Kong was a fantastic place to be. Friendly communities and amazing games. Especially the earlier RPGs and MMOs. I had such fun on the older MMOs that have all since been such down. From AA:TG, Odin Quest, Call of Gods, RotMG, and more. Kong was a huge part of my teenage years. As Flash started to wane, the quality of games dropped sharply. Even then the devs who did take the plunge and learn Unity, the games from that released on Kong rarely lived up to the quality of Flash games. The chat rooms also become more niche and weird. As an example, there were one or two major teen dating public chat rooms that they could never get control of. No matter how many people they banned, they'd just keep making new accounts.
winrid 6y ago
I still remember loading up Kitty Cannon over dial up in the farm house in our small town of seven in Western PA. Nostalgia. RIP Kongregate.
grammarnazzzi 6y ago
I feel like a friend just died. I had no idea they were folding. They just rolled out a new currency feature (blocks) 12 days ago. I've been on the site for so many years. 1936 badges level 73. I'm grieving and in denial this is even happening! I subscribed NewGrounds because I don't want them to disappear too :sad:
tarkin2 6y ago
Flash posed a threat to Apple’s walled garden. Apple wants you to download an iPhone app (and buy the iPhone for that) If all a user needs to do is open a browser tab, on any device, and have an good app-like experience they hardly need an iPhone. The web never really caught up with the experience flash gave the user. And Apple benefited.
- Pulcinella 6y ago
  Can’t you still open a browser tab? Web apps do exist. How is that any different?
  - tarkin2 6y ago
    As mentioned elsewhere, the experience flash gave has never been beat in most cases.
libraryatnight 6y ago
Sad to see Flash going out like this. It was such an easy tool for any creative to put to use and then share the result.
blitztime 6y ago
This is very sad news. I spent a great deal of time in my childhood playing games on Kongregate. I remember reading strategy guides for Kongai, their CCG that admitted wasn't very good but I always tried to complete the game challenges to earn that weeks Kongai card. Eventually it seemed like everyone moved away from browser games to console and PC games, at least that was true for me. It's been a long time since I've even thought about Kongregate, but it's still sad to see it go.
SimianLogic2 6y ago
My dream has always been for one of the consoles to buy the scraps of Flash from Adobe, add good controller/save support, and then open it up to developers to make 2D games. Having shipped games in Java, Flash/AS3, haxe, objective c, swift, javascript, unity -- I've never been as productive and happy as when I was using Flash. Swift/SpriteKit is pretty nice, but I'm tired of the Apple treadmill and seeing my games die after a few years unless I put more work into them.
timvdalen 6y ago
I've got to say, I still visit kong every couple of days to see if there are any cool new games. I will miss it.

302 points by teej 6y ago

As a kid, Kongregate was a safe, inclusive space for high-quality games that I didn't have to fear would mess up a family member's computer. It looks like that much hasn't changed a lot, which is great. Sites like this played a large part in increasing my bravery and familiarity on the web, on which I now earn my living.

sodaplayer 6y ago
Yeah, Kongregate was also one of my first chatroom experiences as a kid. The community had many friendly people, and now as an adult, it's nice looking back and feeling I had a good environment to learn how to interact on the web. It also inspired me to learn Actionscript to try to make my own Flash games, which eventually lead to me now with a CS degree.
maerF0x0 6y ago
> that I didn't have to fear would mess up a family member's computer Save for having flash enabled . Hard to believe they've validated all 128,000 games.
- tkzed49 6y ago
  To be more realistic, Flash was a much smaller attack surface than downloading and running random executables. I'm guessing that a fairly small number of kids were actually subject to Flash exploits while playing games on Kongregate. Compare that to downloading a screensaver...
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    I don’t see the difference between running a Flash app with no sand boxing whatsoever and a random executable.
    - rictic 6y ago
      Security is a continuum, not a binary. Things that native apps can do trivially but that require explicit permission for accessed in Flash (or the web in general): filesystem read/write, listen in on microphones, spy with webcams, etc etc. If you have a flash zero day (and they totally exist!), you can do those things, but that significantly raises the difficulty, which reduces the number of attacks you'll actually see in the wild. Most attackers aren't the NSA or Mossad, and resources that they have to spend on getting and exploiting zero days are resources they can't spend on other parts of the exploit chain.
    - geofft 6y ago
      The Flash API surface does not include direct host access the way the native application API surface does. That means that while identifying native apps doing "bad things" requires solving the halting problem (and moral philosophy), any ability of Flash applets to do "bad things" is an unambiguous bug. Sure, without a sandbox those bugs are easy to exploit when they exist, but they can nonetheless be fixed. I wouldn't trust Flash from 2005 against NSO Group from 2020, but I'd certainly trust it against the author of the Melissa virus. Another way of putting this is that there are two senses of "sandboxed" - one is having a limited API surface and one is using software fault isolation techniques on the interpreter/runtime itself. Flash (and JS) always had the former, even though the latter is fairly recent.
bitL 6y ago
Send them some love then (i.e. $) to help them out.

jgeralnik 6y ago

I spent middle school hacking games on Kongregate to obtain badges and high scores. There were incredible tools available for hacking flash games - debuggers, decompilers, cheat engine like tools. Most of the tools were dedicated to kongregate games and allowed easy interfacing with the website. Years later I tried to remember exactly what tools I had used and what communities I participated in and was never able to find them. Anyone else do the same and have a better recollection of the tools you used?

hyper_reality 6y ago
Yes! That's how I spent a lot of my spare time too in adolescence. There was a forum called Kongrehack run by a Swedish guy where game-hacks were shared. Initially we used Cheat Engine to modify select memory locations in games, but the game creators came up with better defences to obscure the easy hacks. Somebody created an entire browser - called something like Niflheim but I can't remember the exact name - designed for the purpose of cheating Kongregate APIs. Finally, a subversive guy found a way to submit directly to the "I have won a badge API" and wrote a program to submit all the badges in batch. This took the fun out of winning achievements in games, but introduced many of us to the world of coding, automation, and hacking. Why grind for hours when you can cheat the scoreboard in seconds? I also developed a way to cheat on Kongai, which was one of my favourite games on Kongregate. However I got bored and moved onto other things in life shortly after. If you were active in this community around 2008, we probably talked to each other back then.
- nextaccountic 6y ago
  Is this the forum? https://konghack.com/ https://konghack.com/
  - hyper_reality 6y ago
    I don't think so, that website looks a lot newer. And I'm pretty sure the original was called KongreHack or KongregateHack.
- jgeralnik 6y ago

sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago

It feels sort of sad to see this website go. It still reminds me of the kingdom rush games I played a few years ago.

zornthewise 6y ago
You can get them in mobile for like a dollar each and they are just as good if my memory is anything to go by!
- savanaly 6y ago
  Also available on Steam which is where I first played them.

arusahni 6y ago

The community was great - I still talk to some of the folks from the chat rooms I used to mod. I loved the dev community that sprung up around the site, too, with useful userscripts and assistant apps. End of an era. Thanks for all the memories, Kongregate.

_1100 6y ago
I kick myself sometimes for not being around when they cut down on chat rooms and I never got reconnect with anyone in Ninja chat. Jeez I was so young, I’d just log in to kongregate, type “i liek ninjas” because that was how people knew I was at my keyboard, and then spend the whole day playing flash games. I did this hundreds of times over many years, took a break during college, and when I came back they’d culled down the number of chat rooms. Guess I’m just replying to vent, and to also say thanks for all the good times, Kongregate.

at_a_remove 6y ago

I was never big on Flash games but I did enjoy one on Kongregate: a card-based game inspired heavily by the various works of H.P. Lovecraft. I get it, Flash is buggy and second in being a security mistake only to PDFs. Still, it's a shame these little games will be forgotten, swept aside.

mrkramer 6y ago

I never played a video game on Kongregate because when I was interested in browser games Miniclip was number 1 in Europe. I think browser games kinda died when smartphones came around because you got better experience when playing a game naively than in a smartphone browser. But I think browser games technology is better than ever and there are a lot of opportunities to explore in that industry.

javajosh 6y ago

Some of the best games (and game ideas) I've ever seen, bar none, were on Kongregate. Flash (and particularly later versions of ActionScript) were just so good for this kind of programming, and really, even the modern web hasn't caught up yet. Looking forward though to the next iteration which is HTML5 based...

slimsag 6y ago
I am going to miss this a lot, too. I don't think the "next big thing" here will be HTML5, though. Unity is _ridiculously_ easy and has led to large swaths of indie games on Steam - people don't quite understand just how easy it is to make games in Unity these days. You can pass without understanding coding at all to a large extent, and reminds me a _lot_ of working in Flash. If you don't believe me, look up Sam Hogan on YouTube - or search YouTube for "unity game in 24h". I'm not saying these are all good - but it reminds me a _lot_ of how Flash enabled rapid development of game ideas.
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  Is this an ad? Not only you mention a single engine, you also sell it as super easy. The reality is that making good games is extremely hard, and has always been. Unity is not the first game framework, there have been many along the years. Flash being one of them (while not even designed for that originally!). Some of them are easier, some are more featureful, some have better graphics, some are specialized into a genre etc. While some genres need almost no code, others are full of pages of tricky game logic. And that is without counting into account the engine code. Further, Unity had nothing to do with Steam being flooded. The actual reason is that 1- Valve pivoted into being a distribution platform, 2- they stopped curating what goes in, 3- gaming exploded and became way more mainstream (along with streaming, e-sports and programming, all which helped a lot), and 4- people started making money selling courses, degrees and content on how to make games.
  - dang 6y ago
    You broke the site guidelines here. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? Note that they ask people not to post insinuations about astroturfing or shilling. Your comment is great without that first bit.

Kiro 6y ago

How did games work on Kongregate? Did people makes games specifically for the platform with their APIs?

ars 6y ago
Typically they would have an existing game and then integrate the APIs into the game. You didn't have to do that, You could still upload your game without it. It was just if you wanted a chance of getting badged. And badged games had way more plays. So there was a lot of incentive to do it.

derivagral 6y ago

Funny timing; I was considering whether I wanted to use their platform to try a concept or two and get "free" social support, but now I suppose I'll have to figure out handling that on my own. Also wonder how much of this is business/cost optimization vs user-generated liability.

Sniffnoy 6y ago

Man, I just hope someone can somehow bring back Kongai (and fix the remaining bugs). That game was amazing; it was just a poor fit for what it was used for. (A difficult competitive game used as a sitewide metagame on a site full of quick casual games...? What were they thinking? But the game was amazing! There's just not really any good way to play it anymore.)

chillwaves 6y ago

Browser based games are better than ever. Wonder where it will go next. My favorite, which was acquired by Kongregate in Dec 2019: https://surviv.io https://surviv.io 2D Last Man Standing. Great fun.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
Capabilities are better, thanks to WebGL and modern JavaScript - and no proprietary tooling is needed, but the overall barrier for entry now is much higher: during the heyday of Flash any teenager could put together something silly, adapt, learn, improve, and beyond. You can’t do that anymore because there is no good, well-supported, code-free way of making art and animations without writing any code for HTML5+Canvas. None of the kids that got started by making silly animations in Flash back in 1999-2007 could do that today: there is no paintbrush tool for the web.
- sp332 6y ago
  Adobe Animate (previously Flash Professional CC) added an HTML5 export button in mid-2018.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    I understand that Flash's HTML5 support requires a Flash document to created from scratch to support HTML5 and it doesn't support the same features as SWF - but I might be wrong. UPDATE: Yeah, Adobe's document here says that many features aren't supported by their HTML5 export feature: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-html5-canvas-document.html https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-ht...
badsectoracula 6y ago
> Browser based games are better than ever. I disagree, browser based games took a very hard hit after Flash was killed and the infrastructure that was built around these games died. Newgrounds might be still limping around, but pretty much everything else, like Kongregate now, has died and nothing replaced it (most of the sponsors that funded these games moved to mobile, but very few of the actual developers did and mobile games are very different than the more raw/brutal flash games you'd find on pretty much every flash gaming site out there). The tech, from a purely technical and capabilities perspective, is better sure. But the ecosystem and tools are much worse.

ianai 6y ago

So what happened to this site? Did people move onto something else (a site) or was it smartphones?

ars 6y ago
It was killed by Flash. Adobe is not just going to stop updating flash, they are outright force disabling it at the end of the year, even for people willing to risk it. This kills the majority of the games on Kongregate.
- 8note 6y ago
  And thus shockwave, with its .exe outputs wins in the end for old games?
  - hobs 6y ago
    Eh, you can still run a flash decompiler and recompile it to an exe (which embeds the flash player) https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-decompiler https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-decompiler

dvaun 6y ago

There are still old places like Stickpage[0] and Newgrounds[1] that are up. They feel like relics from the early web before mass consolidation onto social networks like MySpace took place. [0]: https://www.stickpage.com/ https://www.stickpage.com/ [1]: https://www.newgrounds.com/ https://www.newgrounds.com/

legohead 6y ago
https://armorgames.com/ https://armorgames.com/
- inglor 6y ago
  I grew up in Newgrounds and helped Dan set up ArmorGames and ran some of their contests. It was a lot of fun and a super creative space.
  - gotostatement 6y ago
    omg inglor! I remember your name was a meme back when I was in the newgrounds forums learning how to make games. I remember you had a contest(?) or were just helping people learn how to make games only using the drawing API without any hand-drawn assets. thank you!! :)
  - cableshaft 6y ago
    waves Hi! I made what I'm pretty sure was the first game for ArmorGames, in fact it was still branded GamesOfGondor, since he originally wanted to commission all LOTR-themed games. Dan was a really nice guy, very friendly and enthusiastic. Wish I had done more with him in retrospect, but the artist I was working with suddenly lost interest while working on the second game, and things kinda fell apart. The first game is still up on Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/210883 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/210883
    - inglor 6y ago
      Hey, I remember you! Good times! I was also involved in the GoG days but I didn't think people remembered that. It changed pretty quickly due to legal reasons.

JohnDeHope 6y ago

I was literally just starting to surf their dev pages to get back into some very light HTML game design. I don’t have nearly enough time to make an actual game with an actual game engine. But I’m a professional web developer so I can smack HTML around with a little bit of JavaScript no problem. Now I’m not sure what to do. Is https://ldjam.com/ https://ldjam.com/ the new home for this sort of thing? Newgrounds?

lewispollard 6y ago
Itch.io game jams. Check out Phaser.js, a javascript WebGL games framework, it's dead easy if you know a little JS.
sp332 6y ago
Check out A-Frame or an authoring tool built on it. It's very HTML-oriented.

ars 6y ago

Reading between the lines it seems they can not handle the volume of spam they are getting. (Many forums going read-only, and chat rooms shutting down.)

wizzwizz4 6y ago
Sounds more like they're trying to gently kick the community out, because they're shutting down the site-as-we-know-it. Gently, because Kongregate is still pretty cool.

JeanMarcS 6y ago

But, but, but... How will I get my badge of the day ? All those shiny konpanions I collected for years ? Kongregate is still in my morning ritual, and some new games are still a lot of fun and enjoyable. I guess they want to concentrate themselves on their new kartridge product (not working on Linux...). But I find this announcement surprising (closing chat) as they just added a new (and, well, not very useful) feature to it. Strange. But I hope they’ll have great time in their new adventures.

ars 6y ago
I'm in the same boat :( I have every single Shiny Kongpanion there is, have not missed a single one. I have around 70% of the badges on the site. In a way, no more badges means I might actually get to 100 (yah right :) - except that with flash breaking probably 90% of the games at the end of the year, there's not really a whole lot of time left to do that.
Mathnerd314 6y ago
I lost interest once I hit the level cap, level 65. Although they did raise it, there's little reason to chase after imaginary internet points. The Kongpanions were supposed to be used in games but after a few weeks I had enough Kongpanions to saturate any game that used them. Again, more imaginary internet points.

atcg0101 6y ago

I wonder if this is the beginning of Kongregate's integration and deployment of Forte powered features: https://blog.kongregate.com/kongregate-announces-partnership-with-forte/ https://blog.kongregate.com/kongregate-announces-partnership...

ars 6y ago
They already delivered something with Forte. You earn "blocks" now for getting the weekly kongpanion. You were supposed to be able to exchange them for chat stickers. The launch was a disaster, partly breaking the site for 2 days, and they had to disable the stickers. And without chat, I don't see much point in the stickers. (Maybe they'll find something else to do with the blocks, stickers were never that interesting to me anyway.) In a way you can say that rather than the beginning, Forte actually killed Kongregate, probably by draining developer time and budget.
- atcg0101 6y ago
  I did not know that they already had started with a public roll out of Forte powered features. Thanks for the added insight!

JoshTriplett 6y ago

For people looking for alternatives, try https://www.reddit.com/r/WebGames/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WebGames/ , which specifically lists games that can be played within a browser.

whereistimbo 6y ago

my fav games on kongregate: https://archive.vn/pPJwB https://archive.vn/pPJwB

whereistimbo 6y ago
web.archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20200701213611/https://www.kongregate.com/accounts/whereistimbo/favorites https://web.archive.org/web/20200701213611/https://www.kongr...
- whereistimbo 6y ago
  https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Gik0oLzvfLI3Vb58dOkBPqpWoKYDtQ/mDO-uGaVGZQ https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Gik0oLzvfLI3Vb58dO... my google collection of article https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Yvht3mJiT6aaJJQbQGA9oA/cyCVhmLaHAY https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/Yvht3mJiT6aaJJQbQG... my google collection of later plan

ckocagil 6y ago

People said Flash wouldn't be missed. People said WebGL and canvas would bring us a much better experience. It's been nearly a decade since Steve Jobs declared war on Flash. Where has the entire browser gaming ecosystem gone to? Kongregate had some of the most original games I've ever played. Kongregate shutting down doesn't just sadden me, it infuriates me: all vendors had to do was to sandbox Flash (which Chrome did!) and not autoplay it. Instead everyone followed the lead of an arrogant jerk who obviously knew everything better than everyone. Communities like Kongregate, Armorgames, Newgrounds will never exist again. There will never be another War of the Web.

aaomidi 6y ago
Flash was absolutely atrocious from a technical standpoint. It had to go. We had to adapt to better things. It's not that webgl isn't capable. It's that the market for in browser flash like games has diminished when you can now play AAA games in the browser. The market has changed. And sadly that doesn't mean every single person doesn't want them anymore. Just that the majority don't.
- devwastaken 6y ago
  It was atrocious but there was much better tooling behind it that made it all make sense. I just wish flash would have been stripped down into a web only version that was safe and only for things like flash games.
- Octopodes 6y ago
  >It had to go. We had to adapt to better things. I'm sorry, I don't understand why. If someone develops a fun little game in Flash, and then I play it on Kongregate, what harm has been done?
  - somethingwitty1 6y ago
    Because flash was a plugin, not locked to that one little game. Once you install it, every website could use it. A lot was done, by browsers, over the years to try and give more control to the end-user, but Adobe didn't have too much interest. They were the dominate player, what other option was there!? Countless security vulnerabilities (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...), siphoning personal data back to Adobe, etc. Looking today at what some companies are doing to harvest data, one could say they were just ahead of their time...

Causality1 6y ago

If they want to become a mainstream game developer, gutting an established fanbase and community seems counterproductive.

jpt4 6y ago

The Immortal Grand Prix flash game from 2003 [0] was the single best turn based tactics game I've yet encountered online. Does anyone know whether it is still hosted somewhere, how one might self host Flash games (assuming one had the Shockwave files), or of games comparable to this one? [0] https://youtu.be/VGxhmhNJ9qo https://youtu.be/VGxhmhNJ9qo

madrox 6y ago

End of an era. Browser gaming is a shadow of its former glory. Many of the best mobile games started as flash games here. Then Steve Jobs declared war on Flash and made in-app purchase games possible. Now casual games are the pay-to-win nonsense you see on the App Store. If free markets are truly what is best for consumers, then casual gaming isn’t a free market.

dlbucci 6y ago

I remember joining there when they announced they would have medals (Xbox 360 achievements had just become a thing, and were big). Played a lot of great games and had some fun chatting, too! But the one I maybe think of the most is Desktop Tower Defense (1.5, maybe?), as it was all the rage when I joined. Christ, that was 13 years ago! Gonna have to revisit that soon, I suppose...

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

> Certain ... forums ... will be removed from the site I no longer contribute to any forums because of stuff like this. There were various forums I’ve contributed to over the years — sometimes posting thousands of times over 5-10 years. Then the forum is migrated to new software (losing all user accounts or posts), or shutdown for good. Mozilla did this several times. Why bother spending the time to contribute towards an online community when your credibility in that community can be removed when new management comes in and decides to change forum software or shutdown forums altogether? I imagine it’s how Yahoo Groups people felt. Even my posting to HR is limited to stuff that I guess will be gone one day. Nothing lasts forever.

SenoraRaton 6y ago
Is not the post you just posted on a "forum" A rose by any other name is still a rose.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  Yep. And read my comment about HN at the end.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I think you mistyped it as "HR".
aetherspawn 6y ago
This is true of a game development community that I made about 2500 contributions to (had a goal of making 5-6 meaningful posts per day). They migrated their software and the accounts became unlinked to the previous contributions. In the last 7 years, I contributed only 40 more times.
mtrower 6y ago
> Why bother spending the time to contribute towards an online community when your credibility in that community can be removed when new management comes in and decides to change forum software or shutdown forums altogether? How about for the impact you had during the time it was active? I don't know what your contributions were, but if they were that prolific, then surely they were of service. Shutdowns are always a blow, and I don't intend to tell you want to do with your valuable time. But hopefully you can see more value in your contributions than only what they may have meant in the future.

KiDD 6y ago

Oooof. I Loved Kongregate Games!

smrk007 6y ago

How feasible would it be to clone the entirety of the website? (Scrape games, recreate all functionality, etc.)

frenchie4111 6y ago

RIP. I got my start in software engineering building and publishing (crappy) games to Kongregate. It was a wonderful site, and it will be missed.

Rotdhizon 6y ago

This is upsetting to see but not surprising. As a daily Kong user, the website has been going downhill hard over the past decade. Especially over these last 3-5 years, it's been a wasteland of terrible quality games. In it's early days, Kong was a fantastic place to be. Friendly communities and amazing games. Especially the earlier RPGs and MMOs. I had such fun on the older MMOs that have all since been such down. From AA:TG, Odin Quest, Call of Gods, RotMG, and more. Kong was a huge part of my teenage years. As Flash started to wane, the quality of games dropped sharply. Even then the devs who did take the plunge and learn Unity, the games from that released on Kong rarely lived up to the quality of Flash games. The chat rooms also become more niche and weird. As an example, there were one or two major teen dating public chat rooms that they could never get control of. No matter how many people they banned, they'd just keep making new accounts.

winrid 6y ago

I still remember loading up Kitty Cannon over dial up in the farm house in our small town of seven in Western PA. Nostalgia. RIP Kongregate.

grammarnazzzi 6y ago

I feel like a friend just died. I had no idea they were folding. They just rolled out a new currency feature (blocks) 12 days ago. I've been on the site for so many years. 1936 badges level 73. I'm grieving and in denial this is even happening! I subscribed NewGrounds because I don't want them to disappear too :sad:

tarkin2 6y ago

Flash posed a threat to Apple’s walled garden. Apple wants you to download an iPhone app (and buy the iPhone for that) If all a user needs to do is open a browser tab, on any device, and have an good app-like experience they hardly need an iPhone. The web never really caught up with the experience flash gave the user. And Apple benefited.

Pulcinella 6y ago
Can’t you still open a browser tab? Web apps do exist. How is that any different?
- tarkin2 6y ago
  As mentioned elsewhere, the experience flash gave has never been beat in most cases.

libraryatnight 6y ago

Sad to see Flash going out like this. It was such an easy tool for any creative to put to use and then share the result.

blitztime 6y ago

This is very sad news. I spent a great deal of time in my childhood playing games on Kongregate. I remember reading strategy guides for Kongai, their CCG that admitted wasn't very good but I always tried to complete the game challenges to earn that weeks Kongai card. Eventually it seemed like everyone moved away from browser games to console and PC games, at least that was true for me. It's been a long time since I've even thought about Kongregate, but it's still sad to see it go.

SimianLogic2 6y ago

My dream has always been for one of the consoles to buy the scraps of Flash from Adobe, add good controller/save support, and then open it up to developers to make 2D games. Having shipped games in Java, Flash/AS3, haxe, objective c, swift, javascript, unity -- I've never been as productive and happy as when I was using Flash. Swift/SpriteKit is pretty nice, but I'm tired of the Apple treadmill and seeing my games die after a few years unless I put more work into them.

timvdalen 6y ago

I've got to say, I still visit kong every couple of days to see if there are any cool new games. I will miss it.