The end of Flash Gaming - Adobe to stop supporting Flash at the end of the month

December 31st 2020 will truly be the end of an era, as Adobe plans to terminate support for Flash at the end of the year.

Flash games introduced so many gamers and game developers to the wide field of gaming and its incredible possibilities. With Flash soon coming to an end, it’s worthwhile to look back at all the platform has given to the wider gaming community.

ALL THE FLASH GAMES DIE AT THE END OF THE YEAR pic.twitter.com/G4ESpc52nK

— koko (@8wariorlittle) December 1, 2020

Flash games helped gamers and developers get their start

For those old enough to remember the early days of the internet, back when many Americans still had dialup and the internet came with a disk, Flash games represented some of the first things to actually do on the internet beyond sending an email.

Classic sites like ebaumsworld, newgrounds, and other sites that teachers would ask students to stop visiting during computer labs, gave early gaming a hub for ideas to be shared and spread.

Flash games and animations represented a deluge of content that overwhelmed the internet during the first decade of the millennium. These included such gems as Club Penguin, Bejeweled, N, and QWOP, all of which adapted unique ideas and experimental design to stand out in an ocean of Flash content.

Other Flash Games were later adapted into larger games, with their Flash versions functioning more like a proof-of-concept. Games like Super Meat Boy and Alien Hominid got their starts on Newgrounds only to be later ported with additional content added.

Super Meat Boy ended up revolutionizing platforming with its release, and Alien Hominid eventually led to the creation of Castle Crashers, one of the most well-known party games of the last decade.

rip all flash games https://t.co/0D1vaFxFlr

— birb؜ (@Duzzledmusic) December 1, 2020

The Internet Archives plans to preserve Flash games

Even though the end of Flash spells the end for developers who grew up with the platform, the Internet Archive has announced that it will be preserving some Flash games which will remain playable through an emulator.

These don’t just include popular Flash games important to the era, but also famous animations from the time.

For those who missed out on the early days of the internet this will be a great way to understand just how wild those first years were.

Understand that Flash games and animations were often all students in the early 2000s had access to, and without search engines or a version of YouTube that didn’t take hours to buffer a single 30 second video, Flash was able to fill in the gaps and turn the internet into something worth using.