The twilight of flash games
Alexa play See You Again ft. Charlie Puth
In middle school, I took a class called Tech Shop, or something like that. It was like a wood shop and computer class mixed into one. We built crummy CO2 dragsters, maybe a shelf and used computers to plan our projects out. It was the sort of class that was supposed to spark an interest in engineering or at the very least teach us to take pride in building things with our hands and the aid of technology. But no kid in that class sparked any productive interests because the best thing about Tech class was the dozen or so top-notch computers in the back of the room. Add to that Mr. B's lack of interest in our educational development and it was the perfect environment for tweens looking to waste time playing games. We would rush to build the least aerodynamic or symmetrical things we could so that we’d have 10-20 minutes at the end of class to fuck around on the computers and the main thing we fucked with was Flash games.
There weren’t enough computers for every 12-year-old, so we often had to double or triple up in front of a monitor, but this was more a feature than a bug because the most enjoyable Flash games were multiplayer. You’d be on the left side smashing the WASD while your buddy would be blasting away on the arrows.
I struggle with differentiating what I actually consider good and what I just have a nostalgic attachment to but I can say with certainty that Flash games were good. I also have a nostalgic attachment to them but it’s one based on objective goodness.
The top quality of Flash games — which is the top quality of any product — is that they were free. When my family got a decent enough computer and internet connection, Flash games websites became the main reason to go online. There are so many good Flash games that every time I sat down to draft this story I ended up delaying it by killing an hour or two on a game I would rediscover.
And like I mentioned, they were also a form of socializing at school. Looking back, it felt like we were all looking for some spare minutes and a computer at all times to play a few rounds of Boxhead or Bowman or, if there were four of us, Tron. Of course, teachers caught on which led us to develop a cat and mouse relationship with our school’s firewall.
We’d lose access to games until some kid’s older brother would tell us that if you just got rid of (or add?) the “s” in “https” you could again access the sites. Then the firewall would update and sites would get blocked one by one. Miniclip would get blocked, so we’d migrate to Addicting Games. That would get blocked, so we’d journey over to Armor Games. Eventually, every major site would get blocked, so we’d have to find random sites that hosted a few games. Those would eventually also get blocked, but we finally found one with a decent game library that somehow evaded the firewall until graduation. The site was called AndysLife.org. It was nothing special. Just a page where some dude would blog about random stuff, share comics and, most importantly, where he hosted a long list of Flash games. We always expected the site to be taken down but it persisted. It’s partly the reason I’m such a shit typist. I would give my keyboard a laser beam stare during keyboarding class so I could play games in the last minutes of class. Still no ragrets.
To me, Flash games were one of the last remnants of the old wild west internet where content was more decentralized and people made and shared random stuff just for the hell of it.
**I should note here that I was born in 95 so my knowledge of the old internet is largely secondhand.**Yet Flash games’ influence is present in aspects of gaming today. Tower defense games were born on this platform. Some games, like Alien Hominid, were popular enough that they made it onto a console. And a number of video game designers have said they got their start building Flash games. As is the case with indie games, you could find Flash games that were such absolute garbage but you could also find some truly amazing and creative games. AND THEY WERE ALL FREE.
Sadly, Flash games have entered their twilight and their death feels more absolute now that Adobe has said it will kill Flash at the end of this year. But the games began their decline long ago. They were inching towards this end even before I left middle school.
In 2007, Apple released the iPhone. It was revolutionary and all but, most importantly, it did not run Flash. Steve Jobs even went on to write a whole manifesto where he shit on the platform and laid out why he wouldn’t allow it on Apple products. (Like a fool I bought a Mac right before college in 2013. While I’m sure the lack of Flash compatibility led to higher productivity, it wasn’t worth it. Major regrets).
The iPhone also introduced a direct competitor in the form of mobile games, many of which were free and of similar quality to Flash games. Mobile games took off and, after Android phones got better and cheaper, became accessible to most people. Every version of a Flash game eventually came to exist in some form as a mobile game. Mobile games have become so dominant that if you go back to the old Flash game websites you’ll see ads for mobile games or links to download their mobile counterparts. Some Flash game makers (or aggregators), like Miniclip, even got into the mobile game market.
I should note here that I love mobile games. I cycle through one or two for weeks until I get bored and find new ones (usually in an ad played during a game). But more than boredom, what often keeps me from playing mobile games longer is that they’re not truly free in the way Flash games were. Most are often monetized, either by having a purchase price, by having ads interrupt the gameplay, or by setting up pay-to-play schemes so players can only get so far before they need to pay real money to advance.
I could get lost in a Flash game for long periods of time but I struggle to develop that type of immersion with mobile games when an ad cuts my gameplay every few minutes. Mobile games are still great and I prefer they exist with these flaws than not at all but their flaws just make me feel sad about Flash games’ decline.
As mentioned earlier, Flash is going to be retired this year, ending an era of some of the most accessible gaming. Thankfully, like most things on the internet, this death won’t be absolute. The people over at BlueMaxima have created Flashpoint, a web game preservation project. Flashpoint is a reservoir for more than 59,000 games and it will ensure that this part of internet history doesn’t die with Flash. I downloaded Flashpoint and have to say it made me so happy to get to play these games again and to have them all archived together in one spot.
It’s sad to see Flash go (because of the games, everything else Flash was used for I’m fairly ambivalent about) but I get why it’s happening. I have to admit that when I first heard of Flash’s end, I didn’t panic or get sad because I knew the internet would produce something like Flashpoint. The beauty of the internet, and thus people as a whole, is that when there is something worth preserving, we often find a way to do it. So even as Flash games come to the end of their twilight, I feel assured to know that they’ll live on.