I remembered when flash ‘died’ and thought all of that was just lost history. Turns out there are translation layers that sites (e.g., new grounds) are running, and you can run flash games of the 2000s on your phone today. Kind of crazy that a) I’m still able to see flash uploaded in 2000 and b) I remember some of the games now, 26 years later.
I haven’t used it personally, but the Flashpoint Archive is a locally downloadable collection of Flash games and all. Now that you brought this up, I think I’ll be making some room to download it myself!
It’s super useful for finding stuff from sites that have went offline or no longer have their flash games sections.
Newgrounds was the GOAT, but before that I had put countless hours into the games hosted by Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Lego, Nabisco, etc.
It also supports more than just Flash, so you can use it for those fancy old Shockwave games too!
Oh absolutely other platforms too! I just happened to write that up at ~3am, so I was half asleep at best :D
Funnily enough, but at a previous job I worked roughly 2 miles away from their headquarters in Glenside. Blew my mind to know I was so close to a key building block of the late 90’s / early 00’s internet history.
Dull Man’s Rant: To me it was annoying that you had to install Shockwave Flash just to use the internet, and dont get me started on flash ads… It was great when the canvas element and WebGL was introduced.
That being said, I remember being introduced to homestarrunner.com back in 2000-2001 and then rediscovering it 20 years later! I can’t remember playing flash games I must have tried a few around that time.
I was often on dialup for a long time and it was infuriating to visit a website and discover a 10MB (or more) flash website. Modern web technologies were initially much better. Now webpages are enormous.
I like the cut of your jib. Murfreesboro, Tekken.
Aww man, Homestar Runner was my college pastime. What a great, and still current (kinda) series.
I’ve been playing some flash games periodically, though there are some I used to play that I wasn’t able to find anymore :(
Not on Flashpoint Archive?
Certainly not all of them. The issue is that a lot of them I played on lithuanian flash sites before I knew english, so I mostly just know them by whatever localized names that were made up (which only sometimes matched the originals) which makes it a lot harder to search for them, since I first have to find the english name for them lol. If I remember the name at all, and im not just searching by the description of what I remember the game being. Funnily enough some games that I do know the names of and I can easily find elsewhere also don’t come up on the flashpoint archive
And some of them also were never in english to begin with and were just niche games made in lithuanian… I did search for those as well, but I got 0 results
So yeah :3. I think some of them might just be lost to time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fair, that’s pretty niche.
I know the Internet Archive was okay at grabbing flash content, if you remember the site. But it’s a crapshoot
There are also ways to get a Flash runtime environment set up on a USB. Then, you can load .swf files onto it and run them locally. This is how I would play flash games at school after they blocked all the flash sites and installers.
I remember loving Storm The House. I’ve put so many hours into that thing.
No idea how to get my phone to have a keyboard when you play this lol
Haven’t tried, but pretty sure you can just plug one in.
I still keep a copy of the Taberinos swf around for wasting time.
