36,000 Flash Games Have Been Archived and Saved Before Flash Goes Extinct: Play Them Offline

Adobe has announced that the Flash Play­er will come to the offi­cial end of its life on the last day of this year, Decem­ber 31, 2020. News of the demise of an obso­lete inter­net mul­ti­me­dia plat­form pre­sum­ably both­ers few of today’s web-surfers, but those of us belong­ing to a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion feel in it the end of an era. First intro­duced by Macro­me­dia in 1996, Flash made pos­si­ble the kind of ani­ma­tion and sound we’d sel­dom seen and heard — assum­ing we could man­age to load it through our slug­gish con­nec­tions at all — on the inter­net before. By the ear­ly 2000s, Flash seemed to pow­er most every­thing fun on the inter­net, espe­cial­ly every­thing fun to the kids then in mid­dle and high school who’d grown up along­side the World Wide Web.

Though now deep into adult­hood, we all remem­ber the hours of the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry we hap­pi­ly whiled away on Flash games, rac­ing cars, solv­ing puz­zles, shoot­ing zom­bies, dodg­ing comets, fir­ing can­nons, and pilot­ing heli­copters on class­room com­put­ers. We could, in the­o­ry, find many of these games and play them still today, but that may become impos­si­ble next year when all major web browsers will dis­con­tin­ue their sup­port for Flash.

“That’s where Flash­point comes in to save a huge chunk of gam­ing his­to­ry,” writes Kotaku’s Zack Zwiezen. “Flash­point uses open-source tech to allow folks to down­load and play a large list of games and ani­ma­tions. The full list con­tains just over 36,000 games and you can sug­gest new games to be added if some­thing you love isn’t on here.”

On Flash­point’s down­load page you’ll find its full 290-giga­byte col­lec­tion of Flash games, as well as a small­er ver­sion that only down­loads games as you play them. “While Flash games might not be as impres­sive today, they are still an impor­tant part of gam­ing his­to­ry,” writes Zwiezen. “These small web games can be direct­ly linked to the lat­er rise of mobile and indie games and helped many cre­ators get their feet wet with build­ing and cre­at­ing video games.” In oth­er words, the sim­ple Flash amuse­ments of our school­days gave rise to the graph­i­cal­ly and son­i­cal­ly intense games that we play so com­pul­sive­ly today. Now we have kids who play those sorts of games too, but who among us will ini­ti­ate the next gen­er­a­tion into the ways of Crush the Cas­tle, Age of War, and Bub­ble Trou­ble?

You can find more infor­ma­tion on the flash video game archive on this FAQ page.

via Kotaku

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inter­net Archive Makes 2,500 More Clas­sic MS-DOS Video Games Free to Play Online: Alone in the Dark, Doom, Microsoft Adven­ture, and Oth­ers

Run Vin­tage Video Games (From Pac-Man to E.T.) and Soft­ware in Your Web Brows­er, Thanks to Archive.org

1,100 Clas­sic Arcade Machines Added to the Inter­net Arcade: Play Them Free Online

Play a Col­lec­tion of Clas­sic Hand­held Video Games at the Inter­net Archive: Pac-Man, Don­key Kong, Tron and MC Ham­mer

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.