For a long time, the internet was full of games and all Flash animations built-in. But by the end of this year, Flash will die as almost all major web browsers will withdraw Flash support by 31, 2020. Fortunately, all of that content will not be lost due to Flashpoint, a project that has already saved 36,000 Flash games since disappearing forever.
Back in 2017, Adobe has announced that it will stop funding Flash by the end of 2020. The company has spent three years working with other technology companies such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google to make the transition as smooth as possible. And while many games and apps have migrated to HTML5 or Unity, many other games haven't made the leap to new, safer technology. And with less than a year left, most will not do that.
This is where Flashpoint comes in to save a huge chunk of gaming history. Flashpoint uses open source tech to allow people to download and play large lists of games and photos. The full list contains over 36,000 games
The people working on this project will pull the game when the copyright owner or original author requests it, but it seems that this doesn't happen much. Good. Flash games may seem silly and bizarre in mini-games, but in the last 10 years they probably made up part of the games I've played. If you went to school with a computer lab at any time in the last 15 years, you might have spent hours playing Flash games on sites like Miniclip.
And while Flash games may not be as popular today, they are still an integral part of gaming history. These small web games can be directly linked to the recent rise of mobile and indie games and helped many creators get their feet wet by building and building video games.
Over at the Flashpoint website you can find a section where you can download the full collection. It costs about 290GB, but you can also download a smaller version that only downloads games as you play them if you want to save space on your hard drive.
