Written November 21st, 2020

(Did…did you just go back and update a school project from 5 years ago when you haven’t updated your actual blog in years?

Yes.)

In July 2017, Adobe announced the official end of Flash. The program would be completely discontinued in December 2020. Completely discontinued did not just mean that Adobe would no longer be providing updates for Flash Media Player. The ability to load Flash in a browser would be removed completely from all major browsers, and Flash Media Player would no longer be able to be downloaded at all.

Browsers had been increasingly making it more difficult to access Flash content to prevent security issues. For instance, most browsers would block the loading of the Flash content, prompt you to that it was blocked and ask you to allow it, and then force you to adjust the actual setting as a confirmation the content was being unblocked.

Most browsers applied this setting only to an individual piece of content, so loading another piece of content would require going through these prompts over again. This setting would also be reset when the browser was closed so that the prompt would show again during later browsing sessions (assuming the user would close their browser and were not aiming for the maximum number of open tabs).

This is far heavier protection than most browser warnings at the time since is required a double confirmation nearly every time content was accessed. After December 2020, even this buried access to Flash content would be banned.

Archive all the Things!

Archivist realized a vast amount of internet media would be completely lost. While Flash ruled the internet for over a decade, the content would soon be completely inaccessible and potentially lost forever.

The Internet Archive has been the chief source of archives for many years. I referenced them several times in this project because certain sources I referenced were no longer online. The Archive has implemented an in-browser extension called Ruffle which can mostly emulate Flash content. Not everything will work 100%, but it is the closest they can get to emulating Flash safely.

The Internet Archive posted 2 days ago from the writing of this (…timing!) that they have tested over 1.000 piece of Flash content in their post on how Flash will work in their archive.

However, Flash was HUGE. 1,000 pieces of content is not even a sliver of what was out there. Luckily, there are other downloadable archival projects.

Flashpoint started an archive project in January 2018 to provide users offline access to over 70,000 games (not all from Flash format) and 8,000 Flash animations. An internet connection would not be required to view or play downloaded content. Users could choose to download via torrent a massive half-terabyte archive or download the Flashpoint software and download each animation or game individually.

Newgrounds Auditorium, a software built on top of Flashpoint, provided access to over 131,000 Newgrounds animations. Newgrounds was a extremely popular website for Flash content. It provided a similar offering of downloading the whole archive for 260 GB, or downloading software that can download animations piecemeal.

For reference, at the time of writing this, 260GB would be about a quarter of the storage on a mechanical drive, or nearly all of a solid-state drive, assuming this was a computer used by an average person. While 1-2TB hard drives were not uncommon, they were usually only in middle-range or higher end computers. Cloud storage usually had data caps 5GB or so a file, even with paid services.

Point being, that is both a lot of data and a small amount of data. That is very little data considering these projects were attempting to download and archive, like, 20% of the past internet.

On the other hand, the thing about Flash was you DIDN’T need nice or even passible hardware – it just loaded in your browser. As long as your browser worked (and you were willing to wait for things to load) you were good. There were no hardware requirements. That simplicity is something I feel is lacking on the internet, at least for games.

Where are the Games?

Games are rarely in-browser experiences anymore. There are many tools or experiments in browsers, like mandala generators or data manipulation tools. But, even though they could, people don’t really use modern web technology to make in-browser games. We’ve reverted back to downloading everything again.

There are several competing gaming platforms that come with their own game stores. Several of these gaming platforms are run by major companies, such as Microsoft Xbox for PC, Epic Games, and Origin. Indie games are most likely to be on Steam, which was already a well-established platform when Flash was popular. GOG focuses on revising abandonware and older software, but some indie titles are also included. These games tend to be polished, with at a minimum clear graphics and audio. The games tend to be longer, say at minimum 20 minutes of gameplay you’d play once, rather than an extremely short game with high replay value. Not to say there wasn’t longer Flash games, and there certainly are still PC games focused on replay value.

Game apps purchased for tablets and phones are the closest relation to Flash games today. You are far more likely to find short-form games that play like old Flash games in App form, and some of them can be quite low in production quality.

But, I haven’t seen an app that follows that “MS Paint drawn, high-school level humor, I threw it together over a weekend” style again. Part of this is because an app store does patrol for content quality; those graphics won’t cut it. Part of it is the difficulty curve in getting published: you can’t just upload something you built when you feel like it; there are outside companies that need to approve of your content and it needs to work on a variety of phones and tablets which requires extensive testing.

And finally, it’s a part of a culture that just isn’t around anymore. It got easier to make things with higher quality.

Where is the Animation Now?

YouTube is certainly filling the void for custom animated or filmed content. Popular Flash animations from the past are often uploaded to YouTube, and certain creators are still making animated content. However, the most popular, recommended animation uploaded to YouTube are usually created by student or professional teams, and not nearly as experimental or unpolished as Flash animations were in the past.

Flash as an animation tool for professionals is certainly still around, but is not a tool that a teen in their basement is going to use to express themselves. The average person these days isn’t going to use animation to do that at all.

Tik-Tok is currently the most popular platform for video-based self-expression. It’s an app on your phone where short-form videos can be uploaded. People often post short jokes or silly ideas from 5 seconds long to a few minutes. But, these are often filmed. There may be pre-built filters applied to make hearts appear around a persons face, odd color changes, or bits of silly text, but custom animation is rare.

I am an old, old 31-year old ancient. I still spend most of my free time on a desktop computer. While I don’t personally use Tik-Tok, I have seen several uploads that made it to Reddit, (a different social media platform where you can post pretty much anything, and often gets content posted to it from other social media platforms). It’s the closest cultural comparison I can make, at least right now. Tik-Tok’s popularity and use will probably change in another 6 months.

That’s how it goes. Technology changes.