9 ms·

How Flash games shaped the video game industry (2020)

237 points by jslakro 2y ago

keyle 2y ago
Yes it was crazy times. Flash was full of possibilities. Until Steve Jobs went on the toot horn and told everyone Flash is terrible and it needs to die. No surprise there, old Steve just launched the app store and wanted 30% of every game thank you very much. Then to everyone's surprise, the Adobe CEO went on TV and agreed publicly that Flash had to go and we're working on better "open" tools. All flash developers around the world, even "certified" ones like me (lol!), watch in disdain and disbelief. We're HTML5 developers now. Back to backbone and jquery we go! Long Live Macromedia Flash, and F Adobe. AS3 was OP back in the javascript days where it couldn't parse int properly. Flash got ridiculously fast after years of improvements, and it was unique with this blend of timeline and scripts. Adobe Flex was also a decent web application framework. We don't talk about Director anymore, as well, who was a very powerful tool. All of that is gone now, replaced by teams of 5 people to do the job of 1, and basically trying to get as productive as we were then. But what about game frameworks for web games today? A wasteland. A hundred possibilities and none of them doing a particular stellar job.
- AndrewStephens 2y ago
  Please, flash would have sucked on phones. Even if the battery on the original iPhone could have stood the strain, none of the flash games that existed at the time would have been any fun at all on the phone's tiny screen. I wrote this [0] in 2010 and it remains my one tech prediction that actually came true. A good example of where things lie today is StyScrapers[1] - a flash-like game completely implemented in HTML - not in a canvas but with div elements controlled by the physics engine. It runs smoother and uses the browser much better than flash ever could. [0] https://sheep.horse/2010/2/mobile_safari_does_not_support_flash_%28and_never_wi.html https://sheep.horse/2010/2/mobile_safari_does_not_support_fl... [1] https://vole.wtf/styscraper/ https://vole.wtf/styscraper/
  - dmalik 2y ago
    It didn't suck. BlackBerry had native API support for Air. You could easily port a Flash game using Air and integrate any native APIs you needed. We gave phones and tablets away to any developer who did this. It worked in the browser natively too without the need to install an extension. But fuck Adobe because they didn't give BlackBerry the latest runtime. Adobe killed Flash when they bought Macromedia.
    - duskwuff 2y ago
      > It didn't suck. We're talking about a viewer for Flash web content, though, not freshly authored applications. As point for reference: there was a Flash plugin for Android, for a short while (around 2011-2012). It was awful - not only did a lot of Flash content just not work at all (because it required mouse/keyboard style input), but any content that'd run at all would typically run very poorly on even high-end phones.
      - dmalik 2y ago
        I guess I should have prefaced that if it was made with responsiveness in mind and you took from factor into consideration. Anything can suck. Responsiveness was a huge issue back then not just for Flash.
      - wiseowise 2y ago
        Oh no, it is awful that games designed for keyboard and mouse don’t run properly on a phone (which could be easily overcome with virtual overlay) so let’s get rid of 20 years of creative development and replace them with sludge of non portable idiotic mobile games. I can’t name a single “proper” game that came out of mobile phone era that A) wasn’t a port of a Flash game B) had something that wasn’t possible with flash C) can be installed and available as easy as Flash
    - tikotus 2y ago
      I remember this! I ported one of my games and indeed got a blackberry tablet. Then I ported another one and gave it to my friend to submit, now he also had one... It was huge for a poor student!
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- bitwize 2y ago
  For the longest time, Flash only ran correctly on a Mac running IE5.5 on OS 9, probably because that's what the Macromedia devs all ran/tested with. Anything else, and not only would the frame rate suffer, but Strong Bad's words would gradually desync from his mouth movements. It wouldn't surprise me if critical parts of the Flash plugin were written directly in PowerPC assembly, and then the developers sighed and said "well, we have to port this to WinDoze, so we may as well just rewrite these bits in C++" because x86 gave them the ick and all the cool kids ran a G4 supercomputer with Velocity Engine anyway. They fixed this some time in Flash's twilight years, and CPUs got so fast that the frame rate issues kind of went away on their own. But making large chunks of the web experience depend on a piece of such flaky, proprietary software was not the wisest move the internet made.
  - keyle 2y ago
    Yeah that's the old, old days, and it certainly was the case of Macromedia being a smaller company back then, limited resources etc.
  - egypturnash 2y ago
    Flash did not run terribly well on OS9 Macs either. I was working in the Flash animation scene in the 00's and I spent a couple weeks suffering some bugs that only popped up on the Mac editor with large files. Load huge FLA, make a couple edits, Flash 5 crashes. And it somehow manages to crash so hard that it immediately falls over if I try to run it again, I had to reboot the whole damn OS9 Mac. Which was one of those "cool G4 supercomputers". Load huge FLA, make an edit, immediately save, maybe get a couple more edits, crash, reboot, swear, swear, swear. This bug didn't exist in v4 of the editor but there was no backwards compatibility, so we were stuck. After a while I stopped swearing out loud and just wrote FUCK on a post-it and stuck it to the bezel of my monitor; I think I had a couple of layers of those by the time I was done. Enough to take them off and stick them up on my window and form the word FLASH. Eventually the studio acquired a Windows box (we were an all-Mac shop) and found that this bug didn't exist on there. We were not happy about this discovery. Audio sync was terrible across the whole Flash platform too, by default all the audio was not synced with the frame draws, and if a frame took too long to draw it would not skip ahead. There were workarounds to be discovered but they were obscure and often treated as secret knowledge by people who wanted an edge over other animation studios, I never disassembled any Strongbad Emails but I wouldn't be surprised if the Brothers Chaps never found them until they went off to Hollywood for a while.
- tombert 2y ago
  I still have not found a development platform that's more fun to develop in than Flash. When I was a teenager, it was almost magic; I could draw a little cartoon, convert it to a movie clip, and export it to code; the fact that Flash was an animation-first program meant that it was really fun to draw with, and its integration with code made it so much more fun. Now, part of the reason I have such rose-tinted glasses is because I was a teenager while using it, but still, I just don't think anything has had the fun "prosumer" feeling that Flash did. It didn't feel like it was just a "toy", but it also did kind of feel like a toy. There are some more modern things that are cool, don't get me wrong: Pico-8 is pretty fun, and even more professional things like GDevelop or GameMaker can be fun as well. It just doesn't quite reach to the level that Flash did. I do understood why the platform died, but I am also kind of sad that it did.
  - rtpg 2y ago
    People have pointed out to me that the Flash platform basically still exists with Adobe Animate, AS 3 and everything (including web publishing). So you can theoretically use the same flow as in your memory. I wish the price was not what it was, and I do not pirate software anymore. And Adobe's tricks when it comes to subscriptions are so nasty. This is a huge barrier to me trying to use Animate for anything, even though I'd probably enjoy it so much. Timeline-based programming is such a good system for one-offs.
    - tombert 2y ago
      Wait how do you publish stuff written with AS3 and Adobe Animate in 2025? Ruffle?
      - rtpg 2y ago
        You can just compile to HTML5 output! It “just works” for some version of “works”.
        tombert 2y ago
        Interesting, I tried that feature shortly after the first version was released, but it was terrible, even relatively simple animations wouldn't work.
- toast0 2y ago
  > Until Steve Jobs went on the toot horn and told everyone Flash is terrible and it needs to die. No surprise there, old Steve just launched the app store and wanted 30% of every game thank you very much. > Then to everyone's surprise, the Adobe CEO went on TV and agreed publicly that Flash had to go and we're working on better "open" tools. I've got no love for Jobs, but he wasn't wrong. Flash games were a lot of fun, but flash restaurant menus were terrible, and I'm sure the Adobe CEO was tired of pushing security fixes every other week. Also, I thought Jobs contributed to the death of Flash in the browser should be enough times, before third party apps on iPhone OS were a thing at all? I also don't miss trying to get flash to work consistently on Linux.
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  - Marazan 2y ago
    Ah yes, famously restaurant websites got so much better after flash died Wait... I'm hearing that actually restaurant websites still suck but in HTML 5 now
    - wvbdmp 2y ago
      HTML5 is if you’re lucky. Usually it’s a PDF or even worse, a PDF inside some embedded javascript viewer with page turn animations.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > But what about game frameworks for web games today? A wasteland. A hundred possibilities and none of them doing a particular stellar job. This oddly reminds me of another exchange on HN, in which someone said that the state of software tooling for learning Japanese was very good - in that there are a lot of software developers interested in the problem, and therefore there are a lot of tools around that those developers have built - and the counterpoint came up that while Mandarin Chinese really has just one tool available, Pleco is significantly better than every tool that exists for Japanese. The more vibrant competition in Japanese tooling doesn't seem to have produced any benefits. I can't pretend to have a good diagnosis of why this occurs in modern web game frameworks or in language tooling, but in the language tooling there does seem to be an issue of crowding out - a high-end Chinese-English dictionary is $20,¹² whereas LogoVista's Android edition of the Kenkyusha Green Goddess is $65³ (and if you want English-Japanese in addition to Japanese-English, that's another $65). LogoVista's app has the UI entirely in Japanese, making it a challenge for Japanese learners. But with the dictionary costing that much, anyone thinking "I can make an English interface for this!" might well decide that licensing the dictionary will prevent them from ever being able to turn a profit. ¹ And every Chinese learner I've ever met, other than myself, won't even pay for that - they stick to Pleco's vastly inferior free dictionary. But even that is infinitely better than what you get in Japanese tools, which use the equivalent of CC-CEDICT. ² https://www.pleco.com/products/pleco-for-android/pricing/ https://www.pleco.com/products/pleco-for-android/pricing/ ³ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.logovista.dic.KQNEWJE5 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.logovist... ; I'm not sure what the iOS pricing is currently like, but if someone's interested it's available as paid content through https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dictionaries/id1380563956?platform=iphone https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dictionaries/id1380563956?plat...
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- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  Flash was kind of terrible, though. It was proprietary and the creation tools were largely inaccessible. Some of the plugins only worked on windows boxes. It had a lot of the same issues java applets had with accessibility. Today's ecosystem should be able to support basically the same creations in a much more portable, accessible, performant format. My understanding is that even the flash runtime itself has largely been ported to html/js/webgl/canvas. So why we don't see this is very curious indeed! It must be the lack of accessible animation studios. I don't mean to diminish anything you say, of course, it's all true and these flash games are a cherished point of my childhood. But the true loss hasn't been flash itself but the creative tooling that enabled a generation of artists to express themselves and create fun things and the communities that arose around it.
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- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  This. I can’t believe so many people fell for the scam claim that flash needed to die for security. No, Apple and Google needed it to die so they could control their respective platforms and rent seek.
  - CharlesW 2y ago
    It's a fun theory, but the Flash runtime was the #1 cause of Mac OS crashes. Jobs obviously took that — and Adobe's refusal to take that seriously — extremely personally. https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
- o11c 2y ago
  To be fair, Flash and Java were having an aggressive competition for enabling the most RCE exploits on end-user systems. If we'd had the kind of support for sandboxing then that we do now, they probably would've survived a lot longer.
stuartjohnson12 2y ago
This is an absolutely beautiful work of art and it saddens me that it does not have more upvotes.
hyperhopper 2y ago
This website does not appear to render the games it claims to on Firefox Mobile
sonofhans 2y ago
Flash was one of the best new technologies of the digital age, allowing nearly effortless creativity with easy tools and low-bandwidth, reliable delivery. It was glorious. It was overused, terribly, and often used for questionable purposes (e.g., rendering a static website, or the dreaded SIFR). But it was like MySpace in how well and quickly it democratized creativity on the web, except it also afforded motion and games and video. Flash was great. Adobe is awful, though. I’m not sure if Flash is the most useful thing they’ve killed outright, but it might be. I almost wish I could believe it was intentional, that they bought it to kill it. I really do think it was pure greed and stupidity, though. Most of what Adobe has done in the last 20 years is rent-seeking. Imagine if they’d been a good steward of the tech, made it stable and performant on low-power devices. Yeah, Steve Jobs put the final nail in the coffin. Adobe administered the poison and tailored the funeral suit. Screw Adobe.
- sitkack 2y ago
  It wouldn't be too difficult to make something even better than flash that emitted wasm files, that could run everywhere. It would give lots of folks a creative outlet that could be infinitely shared.
  - RodgerTheGreat 2y ago
    If it's so easy, build it. A portable runtime isn't that hard. An effective and approachable authoring tool is the real challenge.
    - jonplackett 2y ago
      Yes. The authoring tool was the brilliance of flash. It allowed non-coders to make interactive things really easily. Anyone whose made an Instagram filter or TikTik effect recently - it was like that, though even easier, but allowing you to do actual coding right down to very low level stuff should you desire. and you could get push your creation to any screen in the known universe with essentially zero testing.
      - 2y ago
scotty79 2y ago
It's really interesting how Macromedia Flash software unlocked insane creative potential in so so many people in domains of animation and games. I think nothing ever before or after managed to do anything even remotely similar.
tombert 2y ago
So I just bought the latest Itch.io bundle for the California wildfires [1]. I bought it partly because there are a few decent "big" indie games on there, but mostly because these mega itch bundles nostalgically remind me of two similar eras in my life: Digging through Shareware CD mega packs, and browsing for weird games on Newgrounds. The shareware CDs were fun, because they always had enticing titles like "More than 800 games!" or something like that, and as a kid I would dig around the directory structures and play the weird stuff that they had pulled off BBS's. Some of them games would be good, most of them would be pretty mediocre, some would be bad, but it sort of felt like you were unearthing stuff, trying to find an interesting game as you played. Similarly, I would do the same thing on Newgrounds a lot as a teenager. It was fun to find unique games, especially since a lot of these games really had no ambitions of making money, so they could so a lot of things that you couldn't get away with in retail games. You could make them hyper-violent, or gratuitous sexual content, or just odd humor that wasn't really meant to be understood by anyone but the creator and their friend group. My first "real" job after dropping out of college was writing Flash and Coldfusion software in 2012, because I had cut my teeth with Actionscript as a teenager. This was after Steve Jobs' infamous letter, but Flash was still more or less relevant, and I'm grateful to have had paying work with it, if only briefly. [1] https://itch.io/b/2863/california-fire-relief-bundle https://itch.io/b/2863/california-fire-relief-bundle
- vunderba 2y ago
  I remember as a young kid browsing the aisles of the Microcenter close to our house on the weekends like a kid in a candy shop - 500 games on a single disc for 15 dollars, what sorcery was this? One particular pack was specifically for Windows 3x and all the game concepts were... shall we say liberally borrowed from classics - WinTrek, Wintris, Winroids, you get the idea. You can actually still find a few of these old mega shareware CDs on Archive.org under the Shareware CD section. https://archive.org/details/cdbbsarchive https://archive.org/details/cdbbsarchive
  - tombert 2y ago
    Yeah, I remember sometimes they would be really cheap at TJ Maxx of all places, like $5-8. I hated clothe shopping as a kid so my mom would buy them for me occasionally to entice me to put up with trying on a bunch of clothes. I too remember thinking it was magic that they could squeeze so many games in a small space. A lot of them were definitely ripoffs, but I was young enough to not know about most of the originals at the time, so to me they were all completely original games. It was awesome.
rfarley04 2y ago
I remember a few peak Newgrounds games from two decades ago more vividly than AAA, 60hr games that 100%'ed a few years ago.
- daedrdev 2y ago
  Tom Fulp who made Newgrounds also co-founded The Behemoth and made Castle Crashers, among other games
- xandrius 2y ago
  Different times. I think the first glimpses of freedom was what made those moments magical. Now the Internet is even more filled with cool and exciting stuff and I definitely take that for granted. Even just being able to type "hi" and get another human reply with "hi" was mindblowing. Similar to today but for different reasons.
RodgerTheGreat 2y ago
An important detail that isn't touched on here: the Flash authoring tools were proprietary and much too expensive for hobbyists to afford. While many users simply pirated the tools, there was still a vast gulf between authors and the much larger audience of players. The web today is a much more capable ecosystem than "HTML5" was for the original iPhone, and while many web developers crinkle their projects into minified source or opaque WASM blobs, every user has browser developer tools at their fingertips for peeking behind the curtain and making changes live. It is perhaps most surprising that in the post-Flash world no comparable development environments have sprung up to replace its end-to-end animation and interactivity workflow. Game "engines" like Unity and Godot have captured much of the game development audience for Flash, but their ability to produce web exports is clearly an afterthought, producing huge files, glacial load times, and often simply crashing in any browser that isn't a bleeding-edge instance of Chrome.
- notatoad 2y ago
  everybody and their dog had a pirated copy of flash back in the day. i'd bet that there were more users of pirated flash back in the flash gaming heyday than there are unity users today.
  - bloomingkales 2y ago
    I do remember a few kids in high school that were Flash pros pretty early on (as early as 14). I don't recall those kids moving on to actual game development tools. There must have been something very friendly about Flash's onboarding. I'd be curious to know what the equivalent is for kids now days (would be surprising if its Unity/Unreal/Godot). Sort of asking for myself here because I can't for the life of me grasp the UI driven development of Unity/Unreal/Godot.
    - anewhnaccount2 2y ago
      The onboarding was that you just start key frame animating and pasting in actionscripts.
    - 2y ago
dang 2y ago
Discussed at the time (of the article): Flash Game History - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23922206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23922206 - July 2020 (69 comments)
diebeforei485 2y ago
Anyone remember Miniclip.com? Something I didn't realize at the time was that their "Top 10 List" was not actually based on usage stats, but based on their editorial decisions and decisions of games to pay to be on the list.
- t_mann 2y ago
  I do remember it fondly, but I don't remember ever thinking any of what they show you was necessarily based on usage stats. Iirc there were pretty obvious editorial decisions like the front page having a Halloween theme around Halloween and promoting Halloween-themed games, sometimes fairly obvious re-skins of regular front page games (and similar time-based events around some other holidays). It also wasn't expected, it was clearly from the pre-web2 era, there was no upvoting, I believe there wasn't even a comment section. There was nothing to really suggest that how you use the site would directly affect how it'll look (beyond influencing the operators). Top 10 games would obviously have meant a similar thing as top 10 stories on a news site - clearly an editorial decision, where clicks and expectations thereof ofc play a role, but it's not an automatism.
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jvoorhis 2y ago
Seeing the testimonials here reminds me of why working in Engineering at Kongregate was one of the most rewarding stops along my career.
bemmu 2y ago
The current equivalent of Flash games is Roblox games. They also start instantly, and can be created quite quickly. Creators there are often young, experiment rapidly. There are platform-specific trends that someone invents, and which then spread. I fully expect to see new genres and widely known creators being born there. For instance the creator of the massively popular Steam game "Lethal Company" got their start making Roblox games.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Given how Roblox explores kids as creators, maybe it is about time to folks get mad at them like they feel about Flash and Adobe. https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/09/the-trouble-with-roblox-the-video-game-empire-built-on-child-labour https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/09/the-trouble-wi... This is much worse than whatever Flash has achieved.
  - layer8 2y ago
    *exploits
- wiseowise 2y ago
  It’s not an equivalent by far. Flash was democratic. Adobe didn’t dictate what content you can create and there wasn’t a single entity that moderates content. There was pretty wild stuff in Flash with major gore and even porn.
  - droopyEyelids 2y ago
    Tell us you’ve not played Roblox, without telling us you haven’t played roblox…
hassleblad23 2y ago
I have lots of fond memories of playing these mini flash games as a kid :)
cadamsdotcom 2y ago
What if Firefox were to gain a “SWF viewer”? It has a PDF viewer already!
- LinAGKar 2y ago
  It's not built in, but you can install Ruffle as an extension
  - boomboomsubban 2y ago
    Sites can load Ruffle on their own too, see https://archive.org/details/flash_loituma https://archive.org/details/flash_loituma
  - cadamsdotcom 2y ago
    Yep, but I’m talking about reducing friction to zero for viewing an SWF.
boomboomsubban 2y ago
I still wish more games, and UI as a whole, had "press tab to see what you can interact with."
scotty79 2y ago
Fortunately someone decided to archive all of the flash games so we can play them today: https://flashpointarchive.org/ https://flashpointarchive.org/
Devasta 2y ago
The internet has never been as good as it was when flash was at its peak. Just this past week Trump made a tit of himself on camera with Zelenskyy. If this happened in 2005 there'd already be some minigame out where youd be Zelenskyy fighting JD Vance. But flash is bad because it's not semantic markup, so instead we have react slop serving reaction videos istead.
spacechild1 2y ago
I was in high school when Flash was most popular. We played all kinds of Flash games during breaks and free hours. In the computer science branch, students were taught Java and Flash as the two main programming platforms :)
liberaj 2y ago
I have Flash to thank as my gateway into real programming. I was very young (11 or 12 years old). I created personal project games that really helped me love programming. They were never good enough to be published, but I enjoyed them. At the time with no guidance, trying to build desktop applications was overwhelming (I couldn't figure out where to start), and building complicated games in the browser with HTML and JavaScript wasn't a thing (there was no HTML 5 or web canvas). Building a real game in a real game engine felt impossibly out of reach for me at the time. Flash, through ActionScript 2 and 3, gave me that portal to make something real, and taught me all of my fundamentals around loops, functions, arrays, etc. I found a home in StackOverflow and learnt a huge amount. I won't pretend that my games were great, but they really helped to solidify that programming was something that I loved. Without Flash I don't know that I would be where I am today. I now work as an IC in a huge international company. I didn't go down the game development route as I assumed that I would, as I learnt that my passion was in programming itself and not in just writing games. The Flash games were on my personal website when I applied for internships, and I'm sure I have them to thank in part for helping get me through the door (my interviewer did check out the projects on my website). I was sad, but understanding, when Flash finally came to an end. It felt like an end of an era for me, despite having not used it for a very long time. If you got this far, thanks for taking the time to read my reflections!
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237 points by jslakro 2y ago

Yes it was crazy times. Flash was full of possibilities. Until Steve Jobs went on the toot horn and told everyone Flash is terrible and it needs to die. No surprise there, old Steve just launched the app store and wanted 30% of every game thank you very much. Then to everyone's surprise, the Adobe CEO went on TV and agreed publicly that Flash had to go and we're working on better "open" tools. All flash developers around the world, even "certified" ones like me (lol!), watch in disdain and disbelief. We're HTML5 developers now. Back to backbone and jquery we go! Long Live Macromedia Flash, and F Adobe. AS3 was OP back in the javascript days where it couldn't parse int properly. Flash got ridiculously fast after years of improvements, and it was unique with this blend of timeline and scripts. Adobe Flex was also a decent web application framework. We don't talk about Director anymore, as well, who was a very powerful tool. All of that is gone now, replaced by teams of 5 people to do the job of 1, and basically trying to get as productive as we were then. But what about game frameworks for web games today? A wasteland. A hundred possibilities and none of them doing a particular stellar job.

AndrewStephens 2y ago
Please, flash would have sucked on phones. Even if the battery on the original iPhone could have stood the strain, none of the flash games that existed at the time would have been any fun at all on the phone's tiny screen. I wrote this [0] in 2010 and it remains my one tech prediction that actually came true. A good example of where things lie today is StyScrapers[1] - a flash-like game completely implemented in HTML - not in a canvas but with div elements controlled by the physics engine. It runs smoother and uses the browser much better than flash ever could. [0] https://sheep.horse/2010/2/mobile_safari_does_not_support_flash_%28and_never_wi.html https://sheep.horse/2010/2/mobile_safari_does_not_support_fl... [1] https://vole.wtf/styscraper/ https://vole.wtf/styscraper/
- dmalik 2y ago
  It didn't suck. BlackBerry had native API support for Air. You could easily port a Flash game using Air and integrate any native APIs you needed. We gave phones and tablets away to any developer who did this. It worked in the browser natively too without the need to install an extension. But fuck Adobe because they didn't give BlackBerry the latest runtime. Adobe killed Flash when they bought Macromedia.
  - duskwuff 2y ago
    > It didn't suck. We're talking about a viewer for Flash web content, though, not freshly authored applications. As point for reference: there was a Flash plugin for Android, for a short while (around 2011-2012). It was awful - not only did a lot of Flash content just not work at all (because it required mouse/keyboard style input), but any content that'd run at all would typically run very poorly on even high-end phones.
    - dmalik 2y ago
      I guess I should have prefaced that if it was made with responsiveness in mind and you took from factor into consideration. Anything can suck. Responsiveness was a huge issue back then not just for Flash.
    - wiseowise 2y ago
      Oh no, it is awful that games designed for keyboard and mouse don’t run properly on a phone (which could be easily overcome with virtual overlay) so let’s get rid of 20 years of creative development and replace them with sludge of non portable idiotic mobile games. I can’t name a single “proper” game that came out of mobile phone era that A) wasn’t a port of a Flash game B) had something that wasn’t possible with flash C) can be installed and available as easy as Flash
  - tikotus 2y ago
    I remember this! I ported one of my games and indeed got a blackberry tablet. Then I ported another one and gave it to my friend to submit, now he also had one... It was huge for a poor student!
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bitwize 2y ago
For the longest time, Flash only ran correctly on a Mac running IE5.5 on OS 9, probably because that's what the Macromedia devs all ran/tested with. Anything else, and not only would the frame rate suffer, but Strong Bad's words would gradually desync from his mouth movements. It wouldn't surprise me if critical parts of the Flash plugin were written directly in PowerPC assembly, and then the developers sighed and said "well, we have to port this to WinDoze, so we may as well just rewrite these bits in C++" because x86 gave them the ick and all the cool kids ran a G4 supercomputer with Velocity Engine anyway. They fixed this some time in Flash's twilight years, and CPUs got so fast that the frame rate issues kind of went away on their own. But making large chunks of the web experience depend on a piece of such flaky, proprietary software was not the wisest move the internet made.
- keyle 2y ago
  Yeah that's the old, old days, and it certainly was the case of Macromedia being a smaller company back then, limited resources etc.
- egypturnash 2y ago
  Flash did not run terribly well on OS9 Macs either. I was working in the Flash animation scene in the 00's and I spent a couple weeks suffering some bugs that only popped up on the Mac editor with large files. Load huge FLA, make a couple edits, Flash 5 crashes. And it somehow manages to crash so hard that it immediately falls over if I try to run it again, I had to reboot the whole damn OS9 Mac. Which was one of those "cool G4 supercomputers". Load huge FLA, make an edit, immediately save, maybe get a couple more edits, crash, reboot, swear, swear, swear. This bug didn't exist in v4 of the editor but there was no backwards compatibility, so we were stuck. After a while I stopped swearing out loud and just wrote FUCK on a post-it and stuck it to the bezel of my monitor; I think I had a couple of layers of those by the time I was done. Enough to take them off and stick them up on my window and form the word FLASH. Eventually the studio acquired a Windows box (we were an all-Mac shop) and found that this bug didn't exist on there. We were not happy about this discovery. Audio sync was terrible across the whole Flash platform too, by default all the audio was not synced with the frame draws, and if a frame took too long to draw it would not skip ahead. There were workarounds to be discovered but they were obscure and often treated as secret knowledge by people who wanted an edge over other animation studios, I never disassembled any Strongbad Emails but I wouldn't be surprised if the Brothers Chaps never found them until they went off to Hollywood for a while.
tombert 2y ago
I still have not found a development platform that's more fun to develop in than Flash. When I was a teenager, it was almost magic; I could draw a little cartoon, convert it to a movie clip, and export it to code; the fact that Flash was an animation-first program meant that it was really fun to draw with, and its integration with code made it so much more fun. Now, part of the reason I have such rose-tinted glasses is because I was a teenager while using it, but still, I just don't think anything has had the fun "prosumer" feeling that Flash did. It didn't feel like it was just a "toy", but it also did kind of feel like a toy. There are some more modern things that are cool, don't get me wrong: Pico-8 is pretty fun, and even more professional things like GDevelop or GameMaker can be fun as well. It just doesn't quite reach to the level that Flash did. I do understood why the platform died, but I am also kind of sad that it did.
- rtpg 2y ago
  People have pointed out to me that the Flash platform basically still exists with Adobe Animate, AS 3 and everything (including web publishing). So you can theoretically use the same flow as in your memory. I wish the price was not what it was, and I do not pirate software anymore. And Adobe's tricks when it comes to subscriptions are so nasty. This is a huge barrier to me trying to use Animate for anything, even though I'd probably enjoy it so much. Timeline-based programming is such a good system for one-offs.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Wait how do you publish stuff written with AS3 and Adobe Animate in 2025? Ruffle?
    - rtpg 2y ago
      You can just compile to HTML5 output! It “just works” for some version of “works”.
      - tombert 2y ago
        Interesting, I tried that feature shortly after the first version was released, but it was terrible, even relatively simple animations wouldn't work.
toast0 2y ago
> Until Steve Jobs went on the toot horn and told everyone Flash is terrible and it needs to die. No surprise there, old Steve just launched the app store and wanted 30% of every game thank you very much. > Then to everyone's surprise, the Adobe CEO went on TV and agreed publicly that Flash had to go and we're working on better "open" tools. I've got no love for Jobs, but he wasn't wrong. Flash games were a lot of fun, but flash restaurant menus were terrible, and I'm sure the Adobe CEO was tired of pushing security fixes every other week. Also, I thought Jobs contributed to the death of Flash in the browser should be enough times, before third party apps on iPhone OS were a thing at all? I also don't miss trying to get flash to work consistently on Linux.
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- Marazan 2y ago
  Ah yes, famously restaurant websites got so much better after flash died Wait... I'm hearing that actually restaurant websites still suck but in HTML 5 now
  - wvbdmp 2y ago
    HTML5 is if you’re lucky. Usually it’s a PDF or even worse, a PDF inside some embedded javascript viewer with page turn animations.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> But what about game frameworks for web games today? A wasteland. A hundred possibilities and none of them doing a particular stellar job. This oddly reminds me of another exchange on HN, in which someone said that the state of software tooling for learning Japanese was very good - in that there are a lot of software developers interested in the problem, and therefore there are a lot of tools around that those developers have built - and the counterpoint came up that while Mandarin Chinese really has just one tool available, Pleco is significantly better than every tool that exists for Japanese. The more vibrant competition in Japanese tooling doesn't seem to have produced any benefits. I can't pretend to have a good diagnosis of why this occurs in modern web game frameworks or in language tooling, but in the language tooling there does seem to be an issue of crowding out - a high-end Chinese-English dictionary is $20,¹² whereas LogoVista's Android edition of the Kenkyusha Green Goddess is $65³ (and if you want English-Japanese in addition to Japanese-English, that's another $65). LogoVista's app has the UI entirely in Japanese, making it a challenge for Japanese learners. But with the dictionary costing that much, anyone thinking "I can make an English interface for this!" might well decide that licensing the dictionary will prevent them from ever being able to turn a profit. ¹ And every Chinese learner I've ever met, other than myself, won't even pay for that - they stick to Pleco's vastly inferior free dictionary. But even that is infinitely better than what you get in Japanese tools, which use the equivalent of CC-CEDICT. ² https://www.pleco.com/products/pleco-for-android/pricing/ https://www.pleco.com/products/pleco-for-android/pricing/ ³ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.logovista.dic.KQNEWJE5 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.logovist... ; I'm not sure what the iOS pricing is currently like, but if someone's interested it's available as paid content through https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dictionaries/id1380563956?platform=iphone https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dictionaries/id1380563956?plat...
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ForTheKidz 2y ago
Flash was kind of terrible, though. It was proprietary and the creation tools were largely inaccessible. Some of the plugins only worked on windows boxes. It had a lot of the same issues java applets had with accessibility. Today's ecosystem should be able to support basically the same creations in a much more portable, accessible, performant format. My understanding is that even the flash runtime itself has largely been ported to html/js/webgl/canvas. So why we don't see this is very curious indeed! It must be the lack of accessible animation studios. I don't mean to diminish anything you say, of course, it's all true and these flash games are a cherished point of my childhood. But the true loss hasn't been flash itself but the creative tooling that enabled a generation of artists to express themselves and create fun things and the communities that arose around it.
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blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
This. I can’t believe so many people fell for the scam claim that flash needed to die for security. No, Apple and Google needed it to die so they could control their respective platforms and rent seek.
- CharlesW 2y ago
  It's a fun theory, but the Flash runtime was the #1 cause of Mac OS crashes. Jobs obviously took that — and Adobe's refusal to take that seriously — extremely personally. https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
o11c 2y ago
To be fair, Flash and Java were having an aggressive competition for enabling the most RCE exploits on end-user systems. If we'd had the kind of support for sandboxing then that we do now, they probably would've survived a lot longer.

stuartjohnson12 2y ago

This is an absolutely beautiful work of art and it saddens me that it does not have more upvotes.

hyperhopper 2y ago

This website does not appear to render the games it claims to on Firefox Mobile

sonofhans 2y ago

Flash was one of the best new technologies of the digital age, allowing nearly effortless creativity with easy tools and low-bandwidth, reliable delivery. It was glorious. It was overused, terribly, and often used for questionable purposes (e.g., rendering a static website, or the dreaded SIFR). But it was like MySpace in how well and quickly it democratized creativity on the web, except it also afforded motion and games and video. Flash was great. Adobe is awful, though. I’m not sure if Flash is the most useful thing they’ve killed outright, but it might be. I almost wish I could believe it was intentional, that they bought it to kill it. I really do think it was pure greed and stupidity, though. Most of what Adobe has done in the last 20 years is rent-seeking. Imagine if they’d been a good steward of the tech, made it stable and performant on low-power devices. Yeah, Steve Jobs put the final nail in the coffin. Adobe administered the poison and tailored the funeral suit. Screw Adobe.

sitkack 2y ago
It wouldn't be too difficult to make something even better than flash that emitted wasm files, that could run everywhere. It would give lots of folks a creative outlet that could be infinitely shared.
- RodgerTheGreat 2y ago
  If it's so easy, build it. A portable runtime isn't that hard. An effective and approachable authoring tool is the real challenge.
  - jonplackett 2y ago
    Yes. The authoring tool was the brilliance of flash. It allowed non-coders to make interactive things really easily. Anyone whose made an Instagram filter or TikTik effect recently - it was like that, though even easier, but allowing you to do actual coding right down to very low level stuff should you desire. and you could get push your creation to any screen in the known universe with essentially zero testing.
    - 2y ago

scotty79 2y ago

It's really interesting how Macromedia Flash software unlocked insane creative potential in so so many people in domains of animation and games. I think nothing ever before or after managed to do anything even remotely similar.

tombert 2y ago

So I just bought the latest Itch.io bundle for the California wildfires [1]. I bought it partly because there are a few decent "big" indie games on there, but mostly because these mega itch bundles nostalgically remind me of two similar eras in my life: Digging through Shareware CD mega packs, and browsing for weird games on Newgrounds. The shareware CDs were fun, because they always had enticing titles like "More than 800 games!" or something like that, and as a kid I would dig around the directory structures and play the weird stuff that they had pulled off BBS's. Some of them games would be good, most of them would be pretty mediocre, some would be bad, but it sort of felt like you were unearthing stuff, trying to find an interesting game as you played. Similarly, I would do the same thing on Newgrounds a lot as a teenager. It was fun to find unique games, especially since a lot of these games really had no ambitions of making money, so they could so a lot of things that you couldn't get away with in retail games. You could make them hyper-violent, or gratuitous sexual content, or just odd humor that wasn't really meant to be understood by anyone but the creator and their friend group. My first "real" job after dropping out of college was writing Flash and Coldfusion software in 2012, because I had cut my teeth with Actionscript as a teenager. This was after Steve Jobs' infamous letter, but Flash was still more or less relevant, and I'm grateful to have had paying work with it, if only briefly. [1] https://itch.io/b/2863/california-fire-relief-bundle https://itch.io/b/2863/california-fire-relief-bundle

vunderba 2y ago
I remember as a young kid browsing the aisles of the Microcenter close to our house on the weekends like a kid in a candy shop - 500 games on a single disc for 15 dollars, what sorcery was this? One particular pack was specifically for Windows 3x and all the game concepts were... shall we say liberally borrowed from classics - WinTrek, Wintris, Winroids, you get the idea. You can actually still find a few of these old mega shareware CDs on Archive.org under the Shareware CD section. https://archive.org/details/cdbbsarchive https://archive.org/details/cdbbsarchive
- tombert 2y ago
  Yeah, I remember sometimes they would be really cheap at TJ Maxx of all places, like $5-8. I hated clothe shopping as a kid so my mom would buy them for me occasionally to entice me to put up with trying on a bunch of clothes. I too remember thinking it was magic that they could squeeze so many games in a small space. A lot of them were definitely ripoffs, but I was young enough to not know about most of the originals at the time, so to me they were all completely original games. It was awesome.

rfarley04 2y ago

I remember a few peak Newgrounds games from two decades ago more vividly than AAA, 60hr games that 100%'ed a few years ago.

daedrdev 2y ago
Tom Fulp who made Newgrounds also co-founded The Behemoth and made Castle Crashers, among other games
xandrius 2y ago
Different times. I think the first glimpses of freedom was what made those moments magical. Now the Internet is even more filled with cool and exciting stuff and I definitely take that for granted. Even just being able to type "hi" and get another human reply with "hi" was mindblowing. Similar to today but for different reasons.

RodgerTheGreat 2y ago

An important detail that isn't touched on here: the Flash authoring tools were proprietary and much too expensive for hobbyists to afford. While many users simply pirated the tools, there was still a vast gulf between authors and the much larger audience of players. The web today is a much more capable ecosystem than "HTML5" was for the original iPhone, and while many web developers crinkle their projects into minified source or opaque WASM blobs, every user has browser developer tools at their fingertips for peeking behind the curtain and making changes live. It is perhaps most surprising that in the post-Flash world no comparable development environments have sprung up to replace its end-to-end animation and interactivity workflow. Game "engines" like Unity and Godot have captured much of the game development audience for Flash, but their ability to produce web exports is clearly an afterthought, producing huge files, glacial load times, and often simply crashing in any browser that isn't a bleeding-edge instance of Chrome.

notatoad 2y ago
everybody and their dog had a pirated copy of flash back in the day. i'd bet that there were more users of pirated flash back in the flash gaming heyday than there are unity users today.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  I do remember a few kids in high school that were Flash pros pretty early on (as early as 14). I don't recall those kids moving on to actual game development tools. There must have been something very friendly about Flash's onboarding. I'd be curious to know what the equivalent is for kids now days (would be surprising if its Unity/Unreal/Godot). Sort of asking for myself here because I can't for the life of me grasp the UI driven development of Unity/Unreal/Godot.
  - anewhnaccount2 2y ago
    The onboarding was that you just start key frame animating and pasting in actionscripts.
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dang 2y ago

Discussed at the time (of the article): Flash Game History - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23922206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23922206 - July 2020 (69 comments)

diebeforei485 2y ago

Anyone remember Miniclip.com? Something I didn't realize at the time was that their "Top 10 List" was not actually based on usage stats, but based on their editorial decisions and decisions of games to pay to be on the list.

t_mann 2y ago
I do remember it fondly, but I don't remember ever thinking any of what they show you was necessarily based on usage stats. Iirc there were pretty obvious editorial decisions like the front page having a Halloween theme around Halloween and promoting Halloween-themed games, sometimes fairly obvious re-skins of regular front page games (and similar time-based events around some other holidays). It also wasn't expected, it was clearly from the pre-web2 era, there was no upvoting, I believe there wasn't even a comment section. There was nothing to really suggest that how you use the site would directly affect how it'll look (beyond influencing the operators). Top 10 games would obviously have meant a similar thing as top 10 stories on a news site - clearly an editorial decision, where clicks and expectations thereof ofc play a role, but it's not an automatism.

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jvoorhis 2y ago

Seeing the testimonials here reminds me of why working in Engineering at Kongregate was one of the most rewarding stops along my career.

bemmu 2y ago

The current equivalent of Flash games is Roblox games. They also start instantly, and can be created quite quickly. Creators there are often young, experiment rapidly. There are platform-specific trends that someone invents, and which then spread. I fully expect to see new genres and widely known creators being born there. For instance the creator of the massively popular Steam game "Lethal Company" got their start making Roblox games.

pjmlp 2y ago
Given how Roblox explores kids as creators, maybe it is about time to folks get mad at them like they feel about Flash and Adobe. https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/09/the-trouble-with-roblox-the-video-game-empire-built-on-child-labour https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/09/the-trouble-wi... This is much worse than whatever Flash has achieved.
- layer8 2y ago
  *exploits
wiseowise 2y ago
It’s not an equivalent by far. Flash was democratic. Adobe didn’t dictate what content you can create and there wasn’t a single entity that moderates content. There was pretty wild stuff in Flash with major gore and even porn.
- droopyEyelids 2y ago
  Tell us you’ve not played Roblox, without telling us you haven’t played roblox…

hassleblad23 2y ago

I have lots of fond memories of playing these mini flash games as a kid :)

cadamsdotcom 2y ago

What if Firefox were to gain a “SWF viewer”? It has a PDF viewer already!

LinAGKar 2y ago
It's not built in, but you can install Ruffle as an extension
- boomboomsubban 2y ago
  Sites can load Ruffle on their own too, see https://archive.org/details/flash_loituma https://archive.org/details/flash_loituma
- cadamsdotcom 2y ago
  Yep, but I’m talking about reducing friction to zero for viewing an SWF.

boomboomsubban 2y ago

I still wish more games, and UI as a whole, had "press tab to see what you can interact with."

scotty79 2y ago

Fortunately someone decided to archive all of the flash games so we can play them today: https://flashpointarchive.org/ https://flashpointarchive.org/

Devasta 2y ago

The internet has never been as good as it was when flash was at its peak. Just this past week Trump made a tit of himself on camera with Zelenskyy. If this happened in 2005 there'd already be some minigame out where youd be Zelenskyy fighting JD Vance. But flash is bad because it's not semantic markup, so instead we have react slop serving reaction videos istead.

spacechild1 2y ago

I was in high school when Flash was most popular. We played all kinds of Flash games during breaks and free hours. In the computer science branch, students were taught Java and Flash as the two main programming platforms :)

liberaj 2y ago

I have Flash to thank as my gateway into real programming. I was very young (11 or 12 years old). I created personal project games that really helped me love programming. They were never good enough to be published, but I enjoyed them. At the time with no guidance, trying to build desktop applications was overwhelming (I couldn't figure out where to start), and building complicated games in the browser with HTML and JavaScript wasn't a thing (there was no HTML 5 or web canvas). Building a real game in a real game engine felt impossibly out of reach for me at the time. Flash, through ActionScript 2 and 3, gave me that portal to make something real, and taught me all of my fundamentals around loops, functions, arrays, etc. I found a home in StackOverflow and learnt a huge amount. I won't pretend that my games were great, but they really helped to solidify that programming was something that I loved. Without Flash I don't know that I would be where I am today. I now work as an IC in a huge international company. I didn't go down the game development route as I assumed that I would, as I learnt that my passion was in programming itself and not in just writing games. The Flash games were on my personal website when I applied for internships, and I'm sure I have them to thank in part for helping get me through the door (my interviewer did check out the projects on my website). I was sad, but understanding, when Flash finally came to an end. It felt like an end of an era for me, despite having not used it for a very long time. If you got this far, thanks for taking the time to read my reflections!

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