
First a program used to support web animations and other multimedia, Flash was launched in 1996. The experimental nature of Flash led to a wide breadth of games. Flash and its history on the web is part of that story. Increasingly, games are lost to time, whether that’s the loads of apps deemed obsolete when Apple ended 32-bit support on iOS 11 or when a game’s server shuts down. Games are increasingly digital-only, and the act of preservation has shifted beyond simply saving physical copies. “And I thought to myself, ‘Is anyone doing something about this?’ At the time, it seemed like nobody else was worried about the problem.”

“I read an article on Ars Technica back in 2018 saying that Flash was going away,” Latimore told Polygon. The rise and fall of Flash gaming, explained
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Founded by Ben Latimore, who goes by BlueMaxima online, Flashpoint is an open-source software that’s made nearly 40,000 programs, the majority of which are Flash games, available offline. (See: Super Meat Boy predecessor Meat Boy from 2008 or The Behemoth’s 2002 Flash game Alien Hominid.) Thankfully, a group of Flash enthusiasts heard about the shutdown and decided to do something about it. But they will miss the era of the internet - web 1.0 - where games were free, fun, and really weird. It’s safe to say that most people won’t miss Flash. There are newer, open methods for creating games, videos, and animation, stuff like HTML5 and WebGL.

What was once necessary in creating interactive videos and games on the internet is now, at best, obsolete at worst, it’s a security risk. (Apple’s never had a good relationship with Flash the company never let Flash into the iPhone, and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has publicly criticized the product.)

After all, Flash is already disabled by default in many browsers, like Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Flash will be shut down completely at the end of 2020, and most won’t even realize it’s gone. In 2016, Adobe announced it was ending support for the outdated, unstable program most frequently used to create and run animations - a decision that was, according to many, long overdue. By most margins, Adobe’s Flash is already dead.
