Shameless plug, my original Flash puzzle game Psychopath was recreated as a modern react site (with the original levels imported) and native app and many of the players who are from the original community back in 2005 are playing and creating new levels https://pathology.gg
I loved playing Psychopath back in 2006 and built a Java clone in 2007 for a class. I love how many awesome puzzles emerge as people pieced them together to make levels on top of the simple rules. I also remember enjoying Stick Avalanche & Boomshine. Thanks for all the fun times & awesome to bump into you!
Sometime in the late 1990s early 2000s there the website for bomb hip-hop - which was an amazing indie hip-hop production group - had this really great flash demo that I think is gone from the web forever.
Basically just a looped beat and you could play with different elements that made scratch or other hip hop sounds- might have even been what amounts to an interactive link box
If I had any money I’d pay if someone could find it again but alas I think it’s gone forever!
On another thread domain locks came up. I found this issue on ruffle's GitHub which was closed-- I'm not sure if it was actually implemented-- it would require the dev integrating ruffle to specify a URL to emulate.
Holy moly, honored to see my game Bloody Fun Day in their hall of fame.
Unfortunately there seems to be some bugs in their player, the RNG isn't working so all the cuties spawn the same color.
I also wonder if these newer html5 flash players are able to spoof the domain, so all these games can bypass their site locks. which was the style at the time...
Aw, I was super exited to see the Requiem for a Dream website again - this really was my first big WTF moment for artsy stuff on the internet (after frog in a blender). Unfortunately it only works for the first 20 seconds or so, than it ends with a white screen :(
> On our website, Flash content will run on your browser using the Flash Player emulator ruffle. Ruffle is an open source emulator built using the Rust programming language. It uses WebAssembly to run Flash content on modern browsers
Amazing. Is this related to efforts by archive.org to get all of their archived stuff working? (Believe they also are using Ruffle)
That’s really impressive. And good to see. I assumed all this flash content was just lost. Surely there are lots of bugs or unsupported features but hopefully it continues to be developed.
I suppose another option is to just use a browser tgat does support flash? Seems like some exist.
Ruffle isn't a reverse engineered project, from what I can tell. it seems like they're following some spec, and comparing with the flash player, not decomping it
I contributed to Ruffle. They don't reverse engineer (this is explicitly a no), the knowledge comes from the (poor) documentation and from the open sourced flash virtual machine.
Related, the person who made classics like “Mud and Blood” has kept up development of a new version of it on steam. I’ve been a bit addicted to it recently!
I think you may underestimate how approachable flash was to non devs. There is something about an animation engine that triggers code on a given frame that upends how most devs think about code. The main reason to keep it around is I’m not sure there’s anything else like it. Hypercard I understand was close.
That said, part of what made flash approachable was also the ecosystem and the world in general. I don’t expect to see another cambrian explosion that was flash again in my lifetime, and it’s probably ok to let it die, given how tied it was to the zeitgeist of the early 2000s. Still, working for a replacment platform rather than just exporting from existing platforms is probably something the world will likely always need every generation. It’s all about what catches the interest of kids, and there is a known dichotomy between building for experienced users and building for beginners. And platforms will tend toward experienced users over time (mosty because repeat customers are much more profitable than new customers).
Ya, it's not that we want to keep flash alive, it's that we want a similar approach to building web content. Unity has some similarities, but it's much more complex to do basic things.
Ruffle[0] can be embedded in your website to make flash work in modern browsers. Neopets actually did just this a few days ago[1] to bring back their catalog of old flash games.
So if you can find a way to write Flash (the old tools should still be fine, but I haven't looked too deep) you can leverage it and let folks play today.
Absolutely. Get the authoring software, (I hear a certain animate archive has them) and post to NG like all the Flash forward jammers have
Ruffle works wonders
Where are they getting all the Flash files from? Just downloading them all out of the Internet Archive? Kinda weird. Why not just support IA's archiving and hosting efforts
The difference is that 9o3o is Flashpoint's official (experimental) site, whereas Flash Museum is a third-party site that imported Flashpoint's database into WordPress and reuploaded the Flash files into an S3 bucket (without preserving directory structures or accounting for multi-asset items).
About 15 years ago there was a cute flash game where you had a little cube world that was a puzzle to grow into a bigger fancier environment by clicking on trigger points in the correct order.
I have no idea what it was called, and can’t describe it well enough to search for it if it still exists. Every couple of years I try.
Resources like this give me hope that little gems and works of art from the past will live on, even if the underlying tech is gone.
I used to love the eyezmaze games and for about a year or so, I would eagerly await the next instalment in the series. Recently I learned that the developer has cancer and his wife seems to have left him. I think his Twitter also went silent a while ago. Very sad, considering how much joy these games brought me and certainly countless others in the mid-2000s.
Edit: it wasn’t cancer but a heart defect of some sort.
Or... you know... Newgrounds.com. That's also a "living flash museum" in a way, as it has been around continuously since 1995 and still will show you flash movies from any date.
They have a bunch of neutral's games, which I'm very happy to see. They've made some of the best escape the room games I've ever played. Neutral is still actively developing (https://neutralx0.net/) but I don't think they've ported their old stuff over.
Edit: I tried to load a few but unfortunately none of them actually work. Tried a game from another dev I like and though the game loads, the screen is cut off so you can't see all your inventory.
Maybe someone can help me find this, as I can't remember the name: There was a Flash "game" where you control a prince, leave the castle, fight a dragon, and the prince increasingly questions and then resists his (your) irrational choices.
E.g. in the beginning you jump from the balcony into the garden simply because that is the only way forward. Then he says to himself "Why did I jump from the castle balcony in the middle of the night?! I should go back immediately!"
It's a side scrolling platformer in pixel art, and more a short art project than a game. (Though maybe it was one of those early canvas based HMTL5 games.)
Sometime between before 2008 until ~2019 (!), Citi (then Citibank) had a virtual credit creation Flash-only widget that could create virtual cards with optional limits of amount and/or time.
Oh wow, Ruffle can finally do blurs, shadows and other bitmap effects! Lots of late Flash games relied on them and weren't rendering quite right last time I checked. Gotta re-test my collection.
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[ 0.66 ms ] story [ 400 ms ] threadShameless plug, my original Flash puzzle game Psychopath was recreated as a modern react site (with the original levels imported) and native app and many of the players who are from the original community back in 2005 are playing and creating new levels https://pathology.gg
I've started Pathology.
Basically just a looped beat and you could play with different elements that made scratch or other hip hop sounds- might have even been what amounts to an interactive link box
If I had any money I’d pay if someone could find it again but alas I think it’s gone forever!
Thanks
https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/325
I created it over 20 years ago while I was in HS. Still works — thanks to Ruffle!
https://terrycavanaghgames.com/dontlookback/
But this website has it!
https://flashmuseum.org/dont-look-back/
Awesome. It would be a shame if a great game like this were lost just because flash is no longer supported.
Unfortunately there seems to be some bugs in their player, the RNG isn't working so all the cuties spawn the same color.
I also wonder if these newer html5 flash players are able to spoof the domain, so all these games can bypass their site locks. which was the style at the time...
Seems like being able to override was the plan, but not clear it was actually done?
Seems to be using the Flash Player emulator Ruffle - https://ruffle.rs/
Amazing. Is this related to efforts by archive.org to get all of their archived stuff working? (Believe they also are using Ruffle)
I suppose another option is to just use a browser tgat does support flash? Seems like some exist.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1391530/Mud_and_Blood/
Lots of people purport to miss developing in ActionScript, so why isn't this path more popular?
(I was just thinking about this yesterday and was considering submitting an Ask HN :)
I think Actionscript was incredible and comparing it to how JavaScript (and Typescript) evolved is fascinating.
The developer experience of working with RTMP is something we are only now just replicating with solutions like tRPC (or my own Conduit library)
Every popular game engine will export to HTML5/Webassembly now, there's really no need to keep Flash alive just for the sake of nostalgia.
That said, part of what made flash approachable was also the ecosystem and the world in general. I don’t expect to see another cambrian explosion that was flash again in my lifetime, and it’s probably ok to let it die, given how tied it was to the zeitgeist of the early 2000s. Still, working for a replacment platform rather than just exporting from existing platforms is probably something the world will likely always need every generation. It’s all about what catches the interest of kids, and there is a known dichotomy between building for experienced users and building for beginners. And platforms will tend toward experienced users over time (mosty because repeat customers are much more profitable than new customers).
https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1517301
Results are here: https://www.newgrounds.com/collection/flashforward2023
So if you can find a way to write Flash (the old tools should still be fine, but I haven't looked too deep) you can leverage it and let folks play today.
[0]: https://ruffle.rs/
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/17/23798368/neopets-relaunch...
Edited for citations
https://flashmuseum.org/barbie-in-monster-high/
Maybe we're in the midst of a Flash game renaissance.
The difference is that 9o3o is Flashpoint's official (experimental) site, whereas Flash Museum is a third-party site that imported Flashpoint's database into WordPress and reuploaded the Flash files into an S3 bucket (without preserving directory structures or accounting for multi-asset items).
I have no idea what it was called, and can’t describe it well enough to search for it if it still exists. Every couple of years I try.
Resources like this give me hope that little gems and works of art from the past will live on, even if the underlying tech is gone.
Edit:
Wow, this time I found it: https://www.eyezmaze.com/grow/cube/
HTML5: https://www.eyezmaze.com/sp/2016/08/growCube.html Original: https://www.crazygames.com/game/grow-cube
HN is just serendipitous
( There goes my afternoon )
The author seems to be in poor health and in need of financial support: https://www.eyezmaze.com/sp/2020/12/onlineSupport.html
Super cool game!
https://www.eyezmaze.com/flash/tontieV1.html
Edit: it wasn’t cancer but a heart defect of some sort.
Edit: I tried to load a few but unfortunately none of them actually work. Tried a game from another dev I like and though the game loads, the screen is cut off so you can't see all your inventory.
E.g. in the beginning you jump from the balcony into the garden simply because that is the only way forward. Then he says to himself "Why did I jump from the castle balcony in the middle of the night?! I should go back immediately!"
It's a side scrolling platformer in pixel art, and more a short art project than a game. (Though maybe it was one of those early canvas based HMTL5 games.)
[1] https://flashpointarchive.org/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CreditCards/comments/ifc95c/citi_fi...
There were a couple of startups to produce physical virtualizable credit cards.