On many breasts, Adobe & # 39; s Flash is already dead. In 2016, Adobe announced that it was ending support for an old, unstable system that was widely used for creating and using images – a decision that was, in the long run. Flash will be completely shut down by the end of 2020, and most will never know it's over. After all, Flash is already disabled by default in most browsers, such as Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safa. (Apple has never had a good relationship with Flash; the company has never allowed Flash on the iPhone, and Apple founder Steve Jobs has publicly criticized the product.)
What was needed to create videos and video games online is now, after all, gone; worse, it is a security risk. There are new, open ways to create games, videos, and animations, things like HTML5 and WebGL. It is safe to say that most people will not miss Flash. But they will miss the online era – Web 1.0 – where games were free, fun, and indeed it doesn't bother me. (See: Super Meat Boy its predecessor Meat Boy from 2008 or The Behemoth & # 39; s 2002 Flash game Alien Hominid.) Thankfully, a bunch of Flash lovers of the world closed and decided to do something about it. Developed by Ben Latimore, who runs BlueMaxima online, Flashpoint is an open source software that has been developed into nearly 40,000 programs, most of which are Flash games, available offline.
"I'm learning article in Ars Technica back in 2018 saying Flash was going, ”Latimore told P Polygon. "And I thought to myself, & # 39; Did anyone do something about this? & # 39; At that time, it seemed that no one was worried about the problem."
Games are increasingly digital only, and the act of preservation has changed without storing physical copies. In addition, games are a waste of time, even if those workloads are deemed obsolete if Apple has eliminated 32-bit support for iOS 11 or when the game server closes. Flash and its history on the web are part of this story.
What was it
Flash testing type has led to a wide range of games. The first system used to support web animation and many other networks, Flash was introduced in 1996. Its adoption as a game tool was not immediate; developers are already using Adobe Shockwave. Adobe Flash surpassed Shockwave in the stock market, too, and it made sense for developers to make the change – After all, Flash had merged. Everyone still had one.
Not only were professional developers using Flash to create games; in fact, most games are made for kids and young adults just trying things out.
"Many novice developers have been making progress in Flash and doing experiments," New York University Game Center professor Naomi Clark told Polygon. “That's a big deal. Where it is easy to use the tool and if you can access it for a cheap price (…) you can grow quickly and easily and drop something online. ”
Most Flash games were free, played on any browser you found, whether that was your parent's PC, one at the library, or a computer lab at school. There was no actual distribution process, and the publisher was unnecessary.
"The Flash key was that everyone had the plugin, because it was used for things other than games," Clark said.
If you had access to the computer, you could immediately start the Flash games website and start playing. Unless your school blocks the website, of course. After that you will have to learn how to do it, and the kids do it.
"Kids have more traditional intelligence than adults when it comes to technology," Anya Combs, a Flash player and sports head on Kickstarter, told Polygon. "They would see how to get past any kind of security and spend an hour they had in class playing games on these Flash websites."
As the system grew, and more developers started using it to create games, Flash game portals began to explode. Sites like Kindowsate, Add-ons, Coolmath Math Games, New Places, Miniclip and other hosting games, are sometimes developed and uploaded by users. Occasionally, sites can apply for Flash games through the Flash Game License service (FGL), where the winners receive the rights to host the game. After all, in the early years of online advertising, money would be made available to everyone involved. Ads – usually Flash ads – worked on these sites to generate revenue.
Maryland Institute College of Art Game Lab director Jason Corace told Polygon that easy access is essential to the Flash games that spread.
"There was this idea – in the early 2000s – that everyone could just look at the browser and play the same game," Corace said. "It's not that we don't have that now, but simply that, when Flash really worked, it was everywhere."
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Photo: Edmund McMillen, Tommy Refenes
These sites were the first technology to really offer free games on average. The amount of games was part of the fun – they dug up a bunch of quirky, dirty titles to find heavier gems – and continued to bring players back to the charts each week. Addicting Games CEO Bill Karamouszis told Polygon that the venue would release 20 games a week: "Our traffic will be pedestrian," he said. "You see a huge chunk of people coming to the site, affecting the refreshments of the games (to be uploaded)."
There was no major problem when the game ended badly. You just closed the website and moved on to the next. Play that one for a while and then repeat. Other games, like Line Rider
Preservation of its assets
A few major sites, such as Kindowsate and Addicting Games, have been working to keep their popular titles – which means converting games from Flash to HTML5. The range of Flash games available makes it challenging to answer everything, however. Even the most popular websites, such as Flash-weighted websites Neopets
The size and spread of Flash leaves many games at risk. If it weren't for Flashpoint, thousands of games might have disappeared otherwise – and they already have, before the total shutdown of Flash this year.
"It's not New Places, it's not ArmorGames, it's not collections you need to worry about," said Flashpoint founder Latimore. “There are a million other, smaller sites, not just popular sites. Those are the ones I'm most concerned about, which is why I'm so glad Flashpoint got as many people working on it as possible, because there are definitely some small sites I've never heard of, even though I've had this project for months, which keeps coming up with really cool stuff behind it. ”
Latimore describes himself as a "self-guiding hand" these days, with many others in the Flashpoint team working on the curation. With a team of developers, Latimore has created a much more complex system than it looks like. Three interactive programs – web server, redirect, and launcher – play games. Together, they "pretend to be the Internet," which fooles the system into thinking that it is being done on its original server. The launcher is what the player sees, and then the server uploads a fake Internet. The redirector, well, redirects the programs to the fake Internet.
It's a lot of game work that might have had 50 players, at least – but Latimore said he couldn't believe he was being racist. Currently, the team is focused on getting as many games as possible to the launcher, keeping it in perspective, before losing. It is up to the player to sort them out to see what is good, or not. Indeed, there are many games that can be reported on Flashpoint, less ambitious projects that could be a child's first game or feature test.
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Photo: ByteCamp / BlueMaxima
But there's more to it than you like, an old snapshot of an old web site that you may forget. For example, 2-XL Talking Robot Emulator, which is an emulator for self toy from the & # 39; 40s. The Robot 2-XL was released by Tiger Electronics and has dozens of tapes that the robot was going to tap – and a former tape player – to make a Select Your Own Adventure-style game.
"I played in one of the little moments I had and really enjoyed it," Latimore said.
Another Flash project Latimore likes is called ByteCamp, a compilation of student games from a Canadian Canadian camp on campus. There are 700 games inside ByteCamp interface, all of which can be downloaded and played. Latimore said a team member accidentally found him while browsing the Internet Archive – the website he was managing is no longer available, but all the details are still XML information.
"We were lucky to get this," Latimore said. "It's such a thing, these little stupid experiments, these things that kids years ago might want to see and experience (someday)."
These types of games are what the NYU Game Center professor describes as "a rival in the basement," a place where games can be a thing – no special equipment is required to play, and "the range of people who play those games was really different," Clark said. Introducing players to very small personal games and some, some “hard” games.
Clark, who has been working on Flash products for Lego and others, has found in his research that children in the Flash era were willing to try a number of different games, games that exceed what was considered "socially acceptable" if others knew they were playing it.
That's why many fans of Flash developers are so eager to see the history in store (but not all; some have asked Latimore to remove the games from Flashpoint, and he has). There have certainly been problems with Flash and its legacy – there is always a desire to look back at the rose-colored glasses – but what the era represents, for most people, is to be remembered. There really is no analogous ecosystem in Flash games; the closest we can get to sites likeitch.io.
"This kind of ecosystem is probably going to be out there in the chaos of doing things and people doing all kinds of things, both good and bad," Clark said. “Things that make money and things that don't make money. There were experiments with clones of traditional games – all kinds of things. I am concerned that we are experiencing certain times before when things will slow down. ”
