Flash Gaming Evolution: Adapt and Enjoy Beyond Adobe’s Era

Now that the websites hosting Adobe Flash content are down, many people are left wondering how to play Flash games without Flash.

Adobe Flash might be officially dead, but Flash games will never die. Although Adobe stopped supporting Flash Player on December 31, 2020, you can still play Flash games today and access thousands of games.

In this article, we list a handful of projects that allow you to play Flash games without Flash.

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The Death of Adobe Flash

The death of Adobe Flash came as no surprise at all. AlthoughAdobe stopped supporting Flash on December 31, 2020 , the first nail in Flash’s coffin was Apple’s decision to not support it on its iOS device family way back in 2010.

In an open letter explaining Apple’s decision, Steve Jobs criticized Flash’s performance, energy consumption, and security vulnerabilities. Apple might have been right, as were many of the publications that took its side in criticizing Flash’s many flaws. However, back in 1998, when Flash was originally released, it completely revolutionized the internet.

As a lightweight animation tool, it helped turn the static text-based interface of the internet into the interactive portal it has become today. It wouldn’t take long to get noticed by the gaming community, who would start using it to build video games.

A Gaming Legacy That Spans Over Two Decades

Logo Credit: Adobe/Wikimedia Commons

In 2000, Tom Fulp launched his automated Flash games portal,Newgrounds , which accepted, processed, and published Flash content to the internet instantly. This was fundamental to the rise of Flash games.

Suddenly, with just a single click of your mouse, you could load, view, and interact with Flash games and content. And this was five years before YouTube launched.

By the time Adobe stopped supporting Flash, tens of thousands of games had been developed using the technology. Even Nintendo had launched its own Flash game, Mission in Snowdriftland, as a way to advertise other Nintendo products.

But now that Adobe has pulled the plug on Flash, its unmatched gaming legacy is at grave risk of being lost forever. And that would certainly be the case if it were not for a number of projects whose main aim is to allow you to play Flash games without Flash player even after Flash has been declared dead and buried.

How to Play Flash Games Without Adobe Flash Player

The following projects are seeking to preserve Flash games, ensuring we can all continue to enjoy playing Flash games without Flash well into the future:

1. BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint

Efforts to save Flash games began with the individual contributions of Ben Latimore(Medium) . After Latimore published aMedium article that gathered very positive attention over his efforts, Flashpoint turned into the international web game preservation project that it is now.

Latimore’s efforts started in January 2018, in an attempt to outrun the loss of content before the death of Flash. Since then, Flashpoint has evolved into a preservation project for web games and animations created for different internet plugins, frameworks, and standards.

As of version 9.0, Flashpoint has saved over 150,000 games and 25,000 animations running on different platforms, which means it hasgames that don’t need Flash on its catalog as well.

BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint uses a custom-built launcher, Apache, and its very own app, Flashpoint Secure Player. With these, you can play web-based media in a quick, user-friendly environment without leaving permanent changes or security holes on your computer.

Flashpoint offers two versions of its software:Ultimate , a 478GB full-size version that contains every piece of media saved by the project in an offline-ready format, andInfinity , a smaller 500MB version that allows you to download and play Flash games without Flash at will.

2. The Flash Game Archive

The Flash Game Archive is a free archive of Flash games that you can play locally on your computer at any time. Its stated goal is to preserve Flash games before they are completely lost.

This preservation project is headed by the Canadian developer team, Dragom. The Flash Game Archive is a non-profit project and free to use, but if you jointhe Flash Game Archive Patreon you can gain earlier access to all game additions and the ability to request to have new games added.

The Flash Game Archive offers you the opportunity to continue to play Flash games without Flash player by simply downloading its client. The Flash Game Archive software allows you to download Flash games on demand (for full-screen play) andplay Flash games offline .

Games and other media are stored in a data center, with over 4000 games currently in the archive. With each update, more games are added to the Flash Game Archive.

3. The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive, the non-profit digital library of internet sites and other cultural artifacts famous forthe Wayback Machine , is now emulating Flash games and content. Following its tenet, “access drives preservation,” the Internet Archive launched the Emularity project, which makes a wide range of old software run.

In that same spirit, using the Ruffle Flash emulator, the site added flash support to its Emularity system. Ruffle is a Flash player emulator built in the Rust programming language.

Together, The Internet Archive and Ruffle allow you to play Flash games without Flash just as you used to do, even after December 2020. The system works in all browsers that support Webassembly and does not require you to have Adobe Flash Player installed.

4. Newgrounds

Newgrounds, the online entertainment website and company (yes, the same one that helped catapult Flash games to greatness), is another organization that is helping preserve and play Flash games without Flash. Having been home to over 20 years of content built using Flash, it intends to continue to be so even after browsers removed Flash plugin support.

With the idea of preserving Flash games and content, Newgrounds developed its own Flash player. Although it does depend on Adobe’s Flash plugin and you might be asked to install it.

The Newgrounds Player was designed to create a “seamless browsing experience on Newgrounds, while preserving the ability to enjoy all of our classic content,” according to its own download page.

Flash Games Will Live On Forever

Adobe might be dead and buried, but Flash games still live on. For years both users and developers have complained endlessly about Flash’s vulnerabilities and security holes, but none of that will ever erase the fact that this same technology helped the internet become the interactive tool it is today.

Furthermore, Flash practically gave birth to web-based games and helped one of the largest indie gaming scenes emerge out of nowhere. The amount of games built using Flash over its 20-year history is so vast that it surpasses the number of games built for any other platform by far.

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