As the room darkens so you hop off your dad's big desk chair to switch the big light on, you're not sure how long you've been playing Flash games that evening. I remember being entranced by The Fancy Pants Adventures and its sequel World 2. However, when it was announced that Adobe ceased support of Flash at the end of 2020, that was the end of that. No more mooching and meandering walks down memory lane.
Let me put my Morpheus sunglasses on. What if I told you those games are all there, still playable, and probably aren't blocked by your work's intranet service? The non-profit The Internet Archive scooped up these Flash games, animations, and videos that starred in your after-school afternoons like a big friendly giant and gave them a new home through the use of the Flash emulator, Ruffle.
Do you remember any of these strange retro games?
Resultantly there's no need to download the games or an accompanying program. Totalling an incredible 2,260 entries for Flash games alone, you are able to filter the results by creator, like Nickelodeon, Buena Vista Television, Newgrounds, Miniclip, Neil Cicierega and more. If you're now overwhelmed with choice, peruse our list of the very best Flash games for inspiration. Given the immense love for Flash games and animations, and how central they were to nascent Internet culture, it is a wonder that we risked losing all of them to the annals of time.
"Historically, games haven't really considered themselves as being a cultural industry," explained director of culture for the National Videogame Museum, Iain Simons, when we spoke to him about the potential loss of cherished PS3, PSP and PS Vita games. "It's literally baked into their business model that the next game is always the most exciting one, the one you really need to have - and that the previous one is now obsolete. With that underpinning everything, it's easy to see why preservation isn't top of the list of priorities." There we have it. It's a moral duty to play Line Rider for the next hour or two.
Topics: Retro Gaming