Popular Titles Which Started Life as Flash Games

Jamie looks back on popular games with simple beginnings.

- Jamie Davies

This is it folks. Flash is no more. The… software? Platform? Multimedia suite? Actually, I’m too ignorant to be able to surmise exactly what Flash is. All I know is that it’s the name of the wondrous thing which kept websites like Miniclip and Kongregate flush with a steady supply of free, independentlymade games and experiences for, oh, about 25 years or so. Titles like The Impossible Quiz, Slacker Adventure, Interactive Buddy among countless others were made possible thanks to Flash, and if you’re anything like me, you spent hundreds of your childhood hours engrossed in the often crudely drawn (sometimes plain crude) settings and situations they present. That’s an experience which, sadly, (luckily?) future generations will be unable to access. Why? Well, as of the 31st December 2020, Adobe ceased offering Flash, causing web browsers to abandon it and making every piece of software using it inaccessible forever.

Just like our species’ Neanderthalic ancestors, Flash games may be gone, but they haven’t been forgotten. We can recognise certain modernday characteristics as being holdovers from the era where Neanderthals and Homosapiens coexisted, and in the same way, we can point out beloved modern-day games and franchises which are holdovers from the flash game era. Sure, the original source may be lost to time, but we can still enjoy the modern incarnations today. Okay, maybe that’s not a perfect analogy, but it does let me write the word “Neanderthalic”, so I’m sticking with it.