Armor Games, one of the largest repositories of Adobe Flash-based games on the internet, chooses to switch to emulation next year to mitigate Adobe’s planned phasing out of Flash after December 2020.
“Given our large catalog of Flash games, we would like to continue offering these games to our players and help preserve Flash games in general,” said the official announcement from Armor Games
While browser-based gaming has largely shifted to the use of more versatile HTML5 technologies, the end of official support for Flash could also result in decades of gaming history being lost. Armor Games looked at various storage solutions – including converting existing Flash games to HTML5 or requiring a desktop application to play Flash games – but ultimately decided to use the open source Flash emulator Ruffle.
However, this still won’t be a perfect solution. Armor Games doesn’t expect every Flash game to be compatible with Ruffle from day one. These games will be disabled on January 12th, but the sites themselves will remain active as the team continues to develop solutions to keep as many games as possible working.
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Flash games have been a big part of my life, and I can remember countless hours of browsing portals like Armor Games on my school’s library computers when I probably should have studied instead. I am pleased that steps are being taken to preserve this important era in gaming history. It’s also good to treat yourself to a little nostalgia from time to time.
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