
Flash Game History - jslakro
http://www.flashgamehistory.com/
======
chiefofgxbxl
> Nowadays, games like the McDonald's Videogame, where you corrupt politicians
> and destroy the rainforest to make fast food, would most likely be banned
> from the App Store, cutting it off from a large percentage of players.

Brings up a good point of the old WWW: we _expected_ to have to navigate a
number of sites to source content, and it was good! I remember having to surf
Ebaumsworld, Newgrounds, and a bunch of direct content-creator sites to play a
whole slew of games.

------
apignotti
At Leaning Technologies, we are working on preserving _all_ flash content by
running the original x86 Flash plugin via WebAssembly virtualization
(CheerpX). If you want to read more:

[https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-
webassembly-...](https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-
using-cheerpx-an-update-d500b6fbc44e)

[https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-
with...](https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with-
webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f)

A presentation about the architecture of the system:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JUs4c99-mo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JUs4c99-mo)

Feel free to drop me any question:
[https://twitter.com/alexpignotti](https://twitter.com/alexpignotti)

~~~
lopis
Amazing work! Years ago Mozilla was working on a javascript implementation to
help support legacy flash content on a Flashless web, but that got quickly
abandoned before it mature significantly. Glad that someone else is working on
it with a more modern approach.

~~~
apignotti
You are referring to Shumway. I was working at the time on Lightspark, another
FOSS implementation. All these efforts, including the recent ones, like
Ruffle, are doomed due to the sheer complexity of implementing Flash from
scratch.

Our approach is different. We run the binary plugin safely in the browser via
WebAssembly virtualization.

------
jounus
Hi everyone! I wrote the article. It's great to see it shared here on
HackerNews. The people buildings today's tools and technologies are exactly
the people that I want to reach!

So many developers still feel like Flash was the most amazing thing that ever
happened to them in their creative careers.

For building today’s platforms and technologies, it is important to remember
what made Flash great, but it is at risk of being forgotten because Flash will
no longer be supported after December 2020.

I’d like to spread the message to influence and inspire the next generation of
tool creators!

~~~
Kapura
Hey, I loved the article! One comment is the animated header backgrounds are
pretty jarring for people with sensitivity to motion when trying to read.
Would there be a way that you could add a button to pause the animations? I
think it would make the meat of the article much more accessible.

~~~
jounus
You are right. It's only in the beginning, but it can still be annoying. Maybe
it would be better without the screenshake from Canabalt.

------
MattRix
It is such a shame that no modern game development tool comes close to Flash
in terms of ease of use, development speed, and integration of art+animation
(I say this as someone who worked as a professional Flash developer for 5
years and then spent a decade working in Unity).

~~~
salt-licker
Yep. It was also an amazingly natural way to learn to code. Gen Z has a lower
barrier to entry than before for creating just about every form of multimedia
content except games — I’d love to see someone build a fully integrated, easy-
to-learn game design platform to encourage more of them to get into
programming.

~~~
basch
I'm a bit out of the Adobe Animate loop, but was a lot of functionality
removed from it?

~~~
MattRix
It hasn't had functionality removed but it feels clearly like an unloved
product at Adobe. The updates have mostly managed to make it feel worse
instead of better.

On top of that, for kids learning to make games, the idea of getting a
$20/month Adobe CC subscription is a massive stretch. For it to catch on these
days there would really need to be some free tier.

~~~
basch
What was the free tier before, piracy?

------
amitt
This is missing a pretty big chunk of the end-game(s) of Flash: social network
gaming. All of the top Facebook games were using Flash. We built the engine
for FarmVille, CityVille, etc. using ActionScript3. Our artists would author
the animations and sprites in the Flash editor and we'd be able to drop them
in seamlessly into the game.

Additionally, PC/Console 2D & 3D games were using Flash to author and render
their UIs for a very long time via ScaleForm. They only discontinued it in
2018.

Flash gaming became much bigger than Newgrounds and had massive influence on
how to build future WYSIWIG tools to empower designers and artists.

~~~
0xy
How did you find ActionScript compared to other more modern languages?

~~~
ragona
Major FB games were all AS3, which was a very standard language. If you’re
familiar with C# or Java you’d be totally unsurprised.

In fact, Adobe hoped it would become the new JavaScript. The history of ECMA 4
was fascinating[1].

1: [https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-
es4/](https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/)

~~~
collective-intl
AS3 added classes and static typing on top of ECMAScript, but lost out to
regular ES3 in browsers.

In a surprising twist of history, AS3's ideas were rediscovered years later
with a language called Typescript that among other things added classes and
static typing...

Flash development's language and tools were surprisingly ahead of their time!

~~~
jordic
There is still no replacement tooling on the web, the way you can manage movie
clips (as instances), attach animations, control the timeline.. (compose
them)... That was really a joy.. Also was awesome the feedback loop within the
ide (just hit ctrl+enter) to run it and try it. On these times, flash was also
the predominant option for embedding video on websites.. (there are lot's of
stories that are coming back to now: preloading, lazy loading, easing... (I
still follow Robert Penner for they ease equations). Thought people still uses
tweenlite ;)

~~~
ragona
Ha hey, Greensock was and was and is the best, and it’s still going strong for
Js. Frankly we could probably get half the experience of flash if we all just
went and worked with that library!

------
awithrow
Newgrounds will always have a special place in my heart. I remember learning
flash over the summer on a lark and porting a game a friend of mine had
originally written in Q-basic. It was the first time I'd ever "shipped"
something and Newgrounds was where I launched it. The game ended up on the
frontpage which at the time was a huge deal. From there, my game started
showing up all over the web at various flash game websites. One site offered
me $50 for a non-exclusive license which for a college kid was fantastic! Paid
for a nice dinner and drinks for me and my friend. Its neat seeing the game
show up in the top 2000 as well.

Game in question is Roadblocks for anyone interested
[https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/192217](https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/192217)

~~~
jounus
That’s so cool!

------
ulisesrmzroche
Flash cartoons were also a big deal, off the top of my head: Homestar Runner,
Happy Tree Friends, Family Guy, Harvey Birdman, Fosters Home for Imaginary
Friends, Squidbillies, Metalocalypse, and tons more.

For all the problems with Flash, we definitely lost a lot when we dropped it.

~~~
Causality1
The key aspect of early flash was the vectorization of graphics. It resulted
in tiny filesizes for videos that could scale to arbitrarily high resolutions
yet still be downloaded over a dialup connection.

------
tgsovlerkhgsel
Is there any _easy to use, safe_ flash game preservation project?

I remember some project that seems to require you to download the entire 1 TB
torrent and/or some sort of custom launcher, but nothing that focuses on
trying to translate games into JavaScript (or WASM, or something else that
lets you go to a web site and start playing right away), or just provide ZIP
files that you can drop into a VM with an old browser.

Edit: The project I know of is
[https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/](https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/) and
seems the most promising so far that I've seen. It's windows-only, the
sandboxing seems sketchy (seems to explicitly make changes on the host then
try to revert them), and the launcher is almost 2 GB, but I suspect it's the
best we have right now.

~~~
tomjakubowski
You may be interested in Ruffle, which is a Flash emulator written in Rust
that can be cross compiled to run in a browser on WASM.

[http://ruffle-rs.s3-website-us-
west-1.amazonaws.com/builds/w...](http://ruffle-rs.s3-website-us-
west-1.amazonaws.com/builds/web-demo/)

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
The problem with this is finding/getting the SWFs and compatibility, but
newgrounds.com seems to be using this to make old games available, e.g.
[https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/81219](https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/81219)

Unfortunately not all games are compatible yet. (Edit: actually, I could only
get two games to run - the above-mentioned Fishy and Divine Intervention
[https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/136337;](https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/136337;)
everything else fails)

------
Brajeshwar
I wasn't much into games but wrote a lot of ActionScript. Some such as the
video engine for Vongo (STARZ), quite a bit for Walt Disney, and Educational
tools for Pearson Publishing, and few thingies for Nokia.

Let me tell you a story.

So, there was a gathering of supposedly some of the best ActionScript
developers in the world in the Macromedia office in San Francisco (just as
they were about to be acquired by Adobe). These developers were the ones that
wrote libraries the world uses, best game developers, et al.

One of the talks was by Gary Grossman, the father/inventor of ActionScript. He
starts off by saying in the lines of, "I'm going to go a bit technical in
this."

Well, we heard him talk about things after which we begin to think if he was
talking about ActionScript or something else. We looked at each other, “We are
all n00bs here.” ;-)

------
dleslie
As a game developer it feels like _nothing_ has replaced flash; sure, there
have been attempts to recreate the ease of creation, but the surrounding
community was as much flash as the tech itself.

------
pjmlp
10 years later WebAssembly is still trying to match this

[https://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/](https://adobe-
flash.github.io/crossbridge/)

Unreal Engine 3 demo on CrossBridge

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y)

While trying to play the safe card,

"Everything Old is New Again: Binary Security of WebAssembly" \- USENIX 2020

[http://www.software-
lab.org/publications/usenixSec2020-WebAs...](http://www.software-
lab.org/publications/usenixSec2020-WebAssembly.pdf)

And no other tool is yet to match the tooling capabilities of Flash.

~~~
dwild
I remember at the time how everyone were simply saying that Flash was no
longer needed, that sure JS wasn't as fast, but that it would quickly surpass
Flash...

We talk about tool capabilities, but it's also a standalone format, a single
file that you include and it works. There's no way to achieve the same yet in
JS. I'm sure some people tried to push standard ways, but none never became as
standard as including a SWF file.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
> a single file that you include and it works. There's no way to achieve the
> same yet in JS.

You can include all your JS and CSS into one HTML file.

It's widely considered a bad practice for sure, but you absolutely can include
it all in one file. Even your images can be included in the file with base64
encoding.

------
vr46
Great piece of work, seems to focus completely on NewGrounds, which, as a
Flash games developer from 1999-2009, I had not heard of back in the day.
There were Flash games EVERYWHERE from b3ta to Orisinal. We wrote games for
clients and were paid for doing so, and these often had decent marketing
budgets behind them to popularize them, had competitions attached and the
like. The biggest was for LBi and British Gas, Generation Green, where we
threw everything including the kitchen sink at the game, Box2D, particle
emitters, level editor for our game designer, everything. It was pretty
amazing. In the end I was working on Facebook games for Square Enix, which was
- for me - the beginning of the Free-to-play genre but monetization behind the
surface for extras. What a time. Way more fun than it is now.

------
gotostatement
this website almost made me cry. It was a magical time to learn to program
games, with such a low barrier of entry. I loved it so much, it helped me
through a horrible childhood. I no longer feel like I want to make games but I
will never forget the way it felt to be part of that community. I'm so glad
this project is here to honor it and remind me of it.

~~~
jounus
Thanks!

------
Sohcahtoa82
Has there been much of an effort to make something to convert a Flash
animation/game into HTML/JS? Certainly anything ActionScript could do, JS
could do as well, right?

~~~
simcop2387
Nearly everything anyway. ActionScript had access to lots of system apis and
things that may not have browser level equivalents still. In particular the
networking capabilities and I'd be surprised if there's not more.

------
itsjustme2
Really great work here. I love the way the visualizations are laid out, and
the subject is near and dear to me. I often think about getting back into
making games/movies and/or creating a Macromedia Flash 8 clone in the browser.
I loved how there were just a few simple concepts such as frames, tweens,
movie clips, and an asset library that you could tie together with js-like
code to make whatever you wish.

~~~
jounus
Thanks! So many developers loved the animation heavy Flash workflow.

------
ffhhj
Probably most won't remember Fantavision for the Apple II, I loved making
animations with it and then became an early adopter of Flash, programming AS1
to AS3 websites and car customization apps for General Motors. The last cool
thing I did with it was 3D graphics, then moved to Unity.

Interestingly the first versions of Unity game engine included support for
Javascript as a way to bring Flash devs into their product.

------
neovive
What an amazing, nostalgic site! Flash was definitely ahead of its time. I
recall the pure excitement of the early Flash days in 1999. It was a perfect
storm of a having simple to use tool with easy distribution, combined with
being on the cusp of major increases in Internet usage and bandwidth. The
Internet was ripe for a change and Flash offered a perfect combination of
vector drawing, animation, development and distribution tools.

I vividly remember my first experience with Flash: watching an artist use a
Wacom tablet to draw and animate a cartoon using vector brushes, the timeline,
onion-skinning and then adding sound and publishing all from his laptop. As a
web developer pushing out HTML pages with single-pixel gifs and tables, this
was eye-opening. I worked heavily with Flash over the next few years and it
really opened my eyes to the power of animation and motion graphics on the
web.

------
smabie
Remember those madness animations? And that madness flash game? I _loved_ that
shit when I was 12.

------
Kapura
I've seen some other people in the comments mentioning Roblox[0]; the creator
of the McDonalds Videogame mentioned on that website is a CMU professor who
recently explored some Roblox games on his twitter[1]. It definitely feels
like Roblox is the platform that will inspire future generations.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox)

[1]
[https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/128375548540196045...](https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/1283755485401960450)

------
AlchemistCamp
I can't believe it doesn't mention Kongregate.com

That's the site that really roped me into programming... and illustrating with
a Wacom!

------
Wowfunhappy
Can anyone recommend Flash games I should try out? I feel like I completely
missed out on this scene.

------
buryat
I miss Flash

