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Started by Ayodele Bankole (@ayo_archives) ·

Flash stopped on January 12, 2021, and people saved 160,000 games

An entire generation's childhood was Flash games and Flash cartoons, all in a format that was always going to die. I wanted to know how much actually got saved.

7 sources · 56 min down the hole

How I got here

Started with
“where to play old flash games”
Ended at
Ruffle - Flash Emulator

The Trail

  1. “where to play old flash games” (google.com)
  2. Adobe Flash (en.wikipedia.org)
  3. Thoughts on Flash (en.wikipedia.org)

    steve jobs, 2010. the beginning of the end

  4. Newgrounds (en.wikipedia.org)
  5. Homestar Runner (en.wikipedia.org)
  6. Flashpoint Archive (flashpointarchive.org)
  7. Ruffle - Flash Emulator (ruffle.rs)

    a flash emulator in rust that runs in the browser with webassembly

What I came away with

Adobe ended support on December 31, 2020, and Flash Player had a built-in kill switch that stopped it playing content after January 12, 2021. Flashpoint Archive had collected over 160,000 Flash games and animations by 2023, and the Internet Archive runs a lot of Flash in the browser through Ruffle.

Keep going