Flash was one of the best new technologies of the digital age, allowing nearly effortless creativity with easy tools and low-bandwidth, reliable delivery. It was glorious.
It was overused, terribly, and often used for questionable purposes (e.g., rendering a static website, or the dreaded SIFR). But it was like MySpace in how well and quickly it democratized creativity on the web, except it also afforded motion and games and video. Flash was great.
Adobe is awful, though. I’m not sure if Flash is the most useful thing they’ve killed outright, but it might be. I almost wish I could believe it was intentional, that they bought it to kill it. I really do think it was pure greed and stupidity, though. Most of what Adobe has done in the last 20 years is rent-seeking.
Imagine if they’d been a good steward of the tech, made it stable and performant on low-power devices. Yeah, Steve Jobs put the final nail in the coffin. Adobe administered the poison and tailored the funeral suit. Screw Adobe.
2advanced was the epitome of flash design. I don't think I was ever really paying much attention to the content, but it was fun to interact with the UI.
It wouldn't be too difficult to make something even better than flash that emitted wasm files, that could run everywhere. It would give lots of folks a creative outlet that could be infinitely shared.
Yes. The authoring tool was the brilliance of flash. It allowed non-coders to make interactive things really easily.
Anyone whose made an Instagram filter or TikTik effect recently - it was like that, though even easier, but allowing you to do actual coding right down to very low level stuff should you desire.
and you could get push your creation to any screen in the known universe with essentially zero testing.
That program shaped my brain in ways I can't articulate. Took things I learned about computers and animation as an 11yo for granted as basic knowledge.
The flash runtime was pretty efficient but the authoring tools were so easy to use that anyone could produce "working" abominations filled with the most good awful code that got the result they wanted.
Having never used the authoring tool, can you point me towards something to model it after?
I think a Bret Victor, "Inventing on Principal" style editor would be perfect, combined with some sort of scratch like Python IDE where each element is defined in terms of its reactive behaviors with other elements on a timeline.
I didn't say easy, I said not too difficult. Order of magnitude difference. :)
IMO, it’s not the technology that matters but the authoring tools. Flash was easy to pirate, sometimes free with school, and easy to use. Thinking of applications as “animations with scripting” was a great idea because it let people only learn what they wanted to.
If you just want to make animations, skip actionscript entirely. If you want some extra Easter eggs, just turn any symbol into a button and you can trigger any movie clip you want. Want to make this a whole game, heres the whole action script editor.
I don't think so, Flash Player was extremely stable and portable, swfs ran accurately (although sometimes slowly) on all targets, Safari, IE7, Nintendo Wii, didn't matter.
Maybe wasm+Canvas is getting close to being stable. But if you code up a webgl game and test it on desktop Chrome, odds are it'll just be a black screen on anything but the most popular Android devices, and you'll need to do tons of work and testing to get it to run on an iPhone.
And WebGPU is probably at least 5 years away from being stable enough to be considered to "run everywhere".
I strongly considered trying to do this a few times, but ended up writing an swf parser in C++ and used Skia to render. It's probably the best we can do right now, but we still regularly get players who complain about just seeing a black screen.
It doesn't in high-school visual basic seemed to have had a 50% pickup rate based on final project quality (closest I can think of to Godot that I actually saw) , Flash nearly everyone/group had a viable thing to show off for the final project.
Godot is too complicated compared to Flash. Have you ever used Flash? In Flash, you could literally take the brush from the toolbox, draw a circle, and that was your player character. That was it. No importing assets, no creating sprites, no nothing. You literally draw the circle right there with vector art tools, and it can be whatever you want.
And those were THE best vector art tools, because when you drew a shape and the shape overlapped with another, it automatically erased the other shape like you would expect it to in a raster graphics editor. In pretty much every other software I tried, e.g. Inkscape, Affinity, Corel Draw, Illustrator, you just get two separate shape objects one on top of the other. They seem to be designed for drawing the outlines, not to actually paint with brushes. Flash understood what was intuitive for artists.
Honestly, the older I get the stranger I feel about the fact that there was a brilliance in creating interface for people to be productive with back then that seems to be completely gone. I think this may be in part because desktop applications are unusual nowadays, but it's just really strange that the things I remember seeing have been done exactly once and never copied by anybody despite how well they worked.
Building a good tool is the problem. For instance Git was born in a very niche community (kernel programming), yet it spread like wildfire. Despite the shortcomings of its CLI (according to some), and despite the fact there was other well'established tools.
As someone that would rather use Mercurial and was perfectly fine with Subversion, that wild fire was "Linux kernel uses it, was made by Linus, and I want to be cool like Linus".
Rather than a weird "cult of personality", the fact that Git demonstrated with Linux that it could handle a relatively large amount of source code and allow dozens (hundred?) of programmer to work on it "asynchronously" were key factors for adoption, I believe. If SVN was that good, as it was already well-established online (Github was not the first online VCS frontend, far from it), it should have remained the king of the hill. But it was decapitated instead.
I am been using FOSS and commercial source management tooling since 1998, and the very fact that Linus only bothered with git due to BitKeeper changing their licence, proves that there was nothing special about it, other than personality and adoption wave.
Game development often uses commercial solutions like perforce that have central servers so you can lock out your binary files and everyone will know not to touch them at the same time as you.
I think I’ve seen SVN in a single studio in the past decade. It’s almost all Perforce, because of better performance and tooling and the Unreal integration.
And yes, locking unmergeable files is essential either way.
A side effect of the great idea to write application software in Python that perdures to this day, still it was fast enough for purpose, it isn't like doing SCM operations is akin to 120 FPS for a game engine.
It isn't great that are now so many Git GUI clients written in Electron?
The problem with Python CLI tools is startup time. Just firing up the interpreter and importing modules can take a frustratingly long time if you're a twitchy CLI user. That's much less of a problem for a GUI tool that tends to sit open for a while.
Flash was also the go-to technology for animation given the bandwidth constraints of that era. Those six episodes were created using Flash and broadcast on TV: http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html
No they didn't. I was on the CAB (community advisory board) at the time (from the community side, received an invitation due to being very active on several ActionScript forums etc.)
What was happening is this: Adobe inherited Flex Framework from Macromedia. It was atrocious. Bloated, slow, unusable for games or simple interactive applets which made Flash popular in the first place. They tried to market that for creation of admin tools like what VSPhere used to have. The community was crying and complaining to Adobe that they aren't making any effort to support what Flash was good at.
Then smartphones appeared. And Adobe's engineers came up with Flash Catalyst. Conceptually, it was supposed to work similar to Flash or Fireworks, but it was supposed to render its output into generated Flex Framework code. Tons of unjustifiable bloat. Everything was too slow and too big. And whenever the people able to get their hands on the preview complained about it, the answer was always "it's not going to get faster / smaller".
Catalyst came with templates for "typical" phone apps and they were a disaster to deal with. So slow users would probably understand them to be simply broken / frozen. Oh, but Adobe assigned a bunch of career managers to these projects. People came made a lot of promises and got promoted into another department. It was painful to watch.
At the same time, I wrote a project that I called "Frameworkless MXML", it was more of a demonstration than an actual useful library, but the goal was to say that the original inherited framework might be stripped off a lot of bad components and made to be a lot faster and smaller. But it was just that, a PoC that never went anywhere.
I had no interest in working with Flash on smartphones because I see smartphones as proprietary jails and am not interested in contributing to that market. Few people in Flash OSS community probably also felt distaste for the smartphones... and the vast majority were the "non-contributing" users. They waited until the tower completely crumbled and jumped ship.
An important detail that isn't touched on here: the Flash authoring tools were proprietary and much too expensive for hobbyists to afford. While many users simply pirated the tools, there was still a vast gulf between authors and the much larger audience of players.
The web today is a much more capable ecosystem than "HTML5" was for the original iPhone, and while many web developers crinkle their projects into minified source or opaque WASM blobs, every user has browser developer tools at their fingertips for peeking behind the curtain and making changes live.
It is perhaps most surprising that in the post-Flash world no comparable development environments have sprung up to replace its end-to-end animation and interactivity workflow. Game "engines" like Unity and Godot have captured much of the game development audience for Flash, but their ability to produce web exports is clearly an afterthought, producing huge files, glacial load times, and often simply crashing in any browser that isn't a bleeding-edge instance of Chrome.
I think a few comparable development tools have sprung up, including ours, Construct [1], which is very much web-first.
I think the reason people say nothing replaced Flash is because now there are lots of tools instead of just one, as anyone can target HTML5, so the market has fragmented; and the market has changed, as people develop for app stores and platforms like Steam, so the web isn't as big a focus as it used to be (although it's still important).
Construct is great. I used it to make a game with my daughter. The way it jumps straight to the fun bits and then gives opportunities to learn about programming concepts is great.
I couldn’t bring myself to pay the hefty monthly fee though, knowing my kid’s interest would wane and then her creation would be forever inaccessible unless I continued to pay.
One thing I would have gladly paid for is asset packs, being able to adapt some great sprites and background art would have been a killer feature.
Just to be clear, you can still access your projects without a subscription - it's only editing that a subscription unlocks. We also have a full asset store here: https://www.construct.net/en/game-assets
everybody and their dog had a pirated copy of flash back in the day. i'd bet that there were more users of pirated flash back in the flash gaming heyday than there are unity users today.
I do remember a few kids in high school that were Flash pros pretty early on (as early as 14). I don't recall those kids moving on to actual game development tools. There must have been something very friendly about Flash's onboarding. I'd be curious to know what the equivalent is for kids now days (would be surprising if its Unity/Unreal/Godot). Sort of asking for myself here because I can't for the life of me grasp the UI driven development of Unity/Unreal/Godot.
14 would have been about the age i was playing with it too. in my memory, the magic of flash studio was that you could make something so immediately. it worked well for simple things, you didn't have to make a full-on game, a bunch of kids in jr high computer class could actually make something cool in the length of one class.
I think the fact that it was (acquired early and) developed by the PDF company must have had to do with it. Stupid Flash files were everywhere, but Flash contents that are seriously disappointing from artistic perspectives were rare.
Historically, closed source, expensive corporate software for power users can excel at just grinding out the flaws in user experience until every tiny thing you want to do with it is doable, not because of any elegance in design, generalization, or compositionality, but because a developer sat down and made that specific workflow usable. Matlab, excel, and photoshop are the exemplars of this, the flash editor was up there too.
I forget what it was called and I’m too lazy to look it up, but there was a non Adobe IDE for writing and compiling flash apps using AS3 - it was fine, and it was free, I remember using it for a couple projects, though ultimately I preferred how comprehensive adobe’s software was for publishing .swf
>It is perhaps most surprising that in the post-Flash world no comparable development environments have sprung up to replace its end-to-end animation and interactivity workflow. Game "engines" like Unity and Godot have captured much of the game development audience for Flash, but their ability to produce web exports is clearly an afterthought, producing huge files, glacial load times, and often simply crashing in any browser that isn't a bleeding-edge instance of Chrome.
The proprietary tools were only an issue for people who needed the timeline. Games-wise, Both Actionscript 2 and 3 were perfectly usable without Flash. The MTASC compiler was a massive game-changer, and then Adobe released the AS3 compiler themselves, and certainly when I was at a consultancy working on a massive, expensive game, none of us were authoring anything in Flash. Even the designers and artists simply provided image assets.
A few years later, I did use Flash to teach students interactivity (in 2016, I was wondering why myself, but hey, university courses are hardly up-to-date) but there was little other reason to use it.
Today, I still rate AS3 and if there was an LLVM project to output, I don't know, WASM, or similar, I'd try it. Oh, there are?
Of course, MTASC wunderkind Nicolas Cannasse went off to create https://haxe.org/, which was used quite well on Smart TVs and the like for a while, still used in games. Maybe we already have the answer, but the web is too boring for this stuff.
Macromedia released the AS3 compiler. Adobe inherited it as OSS. Adobe were really reluctant to engage with the community on open-source development issues. They always dragged their feet on Linux support. Eventually, Adobe closed Flex Framework to external contributors, and after they donated it to Apache they undermined the community effort by not releasing the player API library, something that made automatic builds a problem (because the user had to interactively accept EULA to download that SWC).
So I just bought the latest Itch.io bundle for the California wildfires [1]. I bought it partly because there are a few decent "big" indie games on there, but mostly because these mega itch bundles nostalgically remind me of two similar eras in my life: Digging through Shareware CD mega packs, and browsing for weird games on Newgrounds.
The shareware CDs were fun, because they always had enticing titles like "More than 800 games!" or something like that, and as a kid I would dig around the directory structures and play the weird stuff that they had pulled off BBS's. Some of them games would be good, most of them would be pretty mediocre, some would be bad, but it sort of felt like you were unearthing stuff, trying to find an interesting game as you played.
Similarly, I would do the same thing on Newgrounds a lot as a teenager. It was fun to find unique games, especially since a lot of these games really had no ambitions of making money, so they could so a lot of things that you couldn't get away with in retail games. You could make them hyper-violent, or gratuitous sexual content, or just odd humor that wasn't really meant to be understood by anyone but the creator and their friend group.
My first "real" job after dropping out of college was writing Flash and Coldfusion software in 2012, because I had cut my teeth with Actionscript as a teenager. This was after Steve Jobs' infamous letter, but Flash was still more or less relevant, and I'm grateful to have had paying work with it, if only briefly.
I remember as a young kid browsing the aisles of the Microcenter close to our house on the weekends like a kid in a candy shop - 500 games on a single disc for 15 dollars, what sorcery was this? One particular pack was specifically for Windows 3x and all the game concepts were... shall we say liberally borrowed from classics - WinTrek, Wintris, Winroids, you get the idea.
You can actually still find a few of these old mega shareware CDs on Archive.org under the Shareware CD section.
Yeah, I remember sometimes they would be really cheap at TJ Maxx of all places, like $5-8. I hated clothe shopping as a kid so my mom would buy them for me occasionally to entice me to put up with trying on a bunch of clothes. I too remember thinking it was magic that they could squeeze so many games in a small space.
A lot of them were definitely ripoffs, but I was young enough to not know about most of the originals at the time, so to me they were all completely original games. It was awesome.
The current equivalent of Flash games is Roblox games.
They also start instantly, and can be created quite quickly. Creators there are often young, experiment rapidly. There are platform-specific trends that someone invents, and which then spread. I fully expect to see new genres and widely known creators being born there.
For instance the creator of the massively popular Steam game "Lethal Company" got their start making Roblox games.
It’s not an equivalent by far. Flash was democratic. Adobe didn’t dictate what content you can create and there wasn’t a single entity that moderates content. There was pretty wild stuff in Flash with major gore and even porn.
Anyone remember Miniclip.com? Something I didn't realize at the time was that their "Top 10 List" was not actually based on usage stats, but based on their editorial decisions and decisions of games to pay to be on the list.
I do remember it fondly, but I don't remember ever thinking any of what they show you was necessarily based on usage stats. Iirc there were pretty obvious editorial decisions like the front page having a Halloween theme around Halloween and promoting Halloween-themed games, sometimes fairly obvious re-skins of regular front page games (and similar time-based events around some other holidays).
It also wasn't expected, it was clearly from the pre-web2 era, there was no upvoting, I believe there wasn't even a comment section. There was nothing to really suggest that how you use the site would directly affect how it'll look (beyond influencing the operators). Top 10 games would obviously have meant a similar thing as top 10 stories on a news site - clearly an editorial decision, where clicks and expectations thereof ofc play a role, but it's not an automatism.
It's really interesting how Macromedia Flash software unlocked insane creative potential in so so many people in domains of animation and games. I think nothing ever before or after managed to do anything even remotely similar.
I have Flash to thank as my gateway into real programming. I was very young (11 or 12 years old). I created personal project games that really helped me love programming. They were never good enough to be published, but I enjoyed them.
At the time with no guidance, trying to build desktop applications was overwhelming (I couldn't figure out where to start), and building complicated games in the browser with HTML and JavaScript wasn't a thing (there was no HTML 5 or web canvas). Building a real game in a real game engine felt impossibly out of reach for me at the time.
Flash, through ActionScript 2 and 3, gave me that portal to make something real, and taught me all of my fundamentals around loops, functions, arrays, etc. I found a home in StackOverflow and learnt a huge amount. I won't pretend that my games were great, but they really helped to solidify that programming was something that I loved.
Without Flash I don't know that I would be where I am today. I now work as an IC in a huge international company. I didn't go down the game development route as I assumed that I would, as I learnt that my passion was in programming itself and not in just writing games. The Flash games were on my personal website when I applied for internships, and I'm sure I have them to thank in part for helping get me through the door (my interviewer did check out the projects on my website).
I was sad, but understanding, when Flash finally came to an end. It felt like an end of an era for me, despite having not used it for a very long time.
If you got this far, thanks for taking the time to read my reflections!
I was in high school when Flash was most popular. We played all kinds of Flash games during breaks and free hours. In the computer science branch, students were taught Java and Flash as the two main programming platforms :)
Yes it was crazy times. Flash was full of possibilities.
Until Steve Jobs went on the toot horn and told everyone Flash is terrible and it needs to die. No surprise there, old Steve just launched the app store and wanted 30% of every game thank you very much.
Then to everyone's surprise, the Adobe CEO went on TV and agreed publicly that Flash had to go and we're working on better "open" tools.
All flash developers around the world, even "certified" ones like me (lol!), watch in disdain and disbelief. We're HTML5 developers now. Back to backbone and jquery we go!
Long Live Macromedia Flash, and F Adobe. AS3 was OP back in the javascript days where it couldn't parse int properly. Flash got ridiculously fast after years of improvements, and it was unique with this blend of timeline and scripts. Adobe Flex was also a decent web application framework. We don't talk about Director anymore, as well, who was a very powerful tool.
All of that is gone now, replaced by teams of 5 people to do the job of 1, and basically trying to get as productive as we were then.
But what about game frameworks for web games today? A wasteland. A hundred possibilities and none of them doing a particular stellar job.
I still have not found a development platform that's more fun to develop in than Flash.
When I was a teenager, it was almost magic; I could draw a little cartoon, convert it to a movie clip, and export it to code; the fact that Flash was an animation-first program meant that it was really fun to draw with, and its integration with code made it so much more fun.
Now, part of the reason I have such rose-tinted glasses is because I was a teenager while using it, but still, I just don't think anything has had the fun "prosumer" feeling that Flash did. It didn't feel like it was just a "toy", but it also did kind of feel like a toy.
There are some more modern things that are cool, don't get me wrong: Pico-8 is pretty fun, and even more professional things like GDevelop or GameMaker can be fun as well. It just doesn't quite reach to the level that Flash did.
I do understood why the platform died, but I am also kind of sad that it did.
People have pointed out to me that the Flash platform basically still exists with Adobe Animate, AS 3 and everything (including web publishing).
So you can theoretically use the same flow as in your memory. I wish the price was not what it was, and I do not pirate software anymore. And Adobe's tricks when it comes to subscriptions are so nasty. This is a huge barrier to me trying to use Animate for anything, even though I'd probably enjoy it so much.
Timeline-based programming is such a good system for one-offs.
It is a lot of work and does not have much potential to earn money. Simple as that
People, including developers, consistently underestimate work that needs to go into developing good user facing tools. And a lot of that work is not fun, not exciting, just work you have to do.
Still, I wish someone would make a clone of the Adobe Animate program that directly exports to WASM, with all the artsy bells and whistles that I loved about it. Specifically, I would like something that I don't have to pay a monthly fee for forever. It was my first "real" experience with writing code, and I know I'm far from alone with that.
Pico8 and Game Maker and GDevelop and Scirra Construct are still fun, so it's not like there's a shortage of game making toolkits for younger people to get into this stuff. I just miss Flash in particular.
Ha, if you were to make a decent Flash clone I would pay a not-insignificant amount of money for it as long as it’s not a subscription thing. I don’t have enough interest in that level of programming to make it myself.
It also doesn’t help that it’s two pronged: Flash is an animation tool and a software development environment.
There are some great animation software packages out there like Toonboom or even something like Moho or Opentoonz, but as far as I am aware they do not have the same kind of direct integration with a programming language like Flash did.
On the other end of the end of the spectrum, you have tools like Game Maker which do have programming as a core feature, but you’re expected to do animations elsewhere and import them in.
So Flash is a competent tool across two complicated domains.
> Until Steve Jobs went on the toot horn and told everyone Flash is terrible and it needs to die. No surprise there, old Steve just launched the app store and wanted 30% of every game thank you very much.
> Then to everyone's surprise, the Adobe CEO went on TV and agreed publicly that Flash had to go and we're working on better "open" tools.
I've got no love for Jobs, but he wasn't wrong. Flash games were a lot of fun, but flash restaurant menus were terrible, and I'm sure the Adobe CEO was tired of pushing security fixes every other week. Also, I thought Jobs contributed to the death of Flash in the browser should be enough times, before third party apps on iPhone OS were a thing at all?
I also don't miss trying to get flash to work consistently on Linux.
Please, flash would have sucked on phones. Even if the battery on the original iPhone could have stood the strain, none of the flash games that existed at the time would have been any fun at all on the phone's tiny screen.
I wrote this [0] in 2010 and it remains my one tech prediction that actually came true.
A good example of where things lie today is StyScrapers[1] - a flash-like game completely implemented in HTML - not in a canvas but with div elements controlled by the physics engine. It runs smoother and uses the browser much better than flash ever could.
It didn't suck. BlackBerry had native API support for Air. You could easily port a Flash game using Air and integrate any native APIs you needed. We gave phones and tablets away to any developer who did this. It worked in the browser natively too without the need to install an extension.
But fuck Adobe because they didn't give BlackBerry the latest runtime.
We're talking about a viewer for Flash web content, though, not freshly authored applications.
As point for reference: there was a Flash plugin for Android, for a short while (around 2011-2012). It was awful - not only did a lot of Flash content just not work at all (because it required mouse/keyboard style input), but any content that'd run at all would typically run very poorly on even high-end phones.
I guess I should have prefaced that if it was made with responsiveness in mind and you took from factor into consideration. Anything can suck. Responsiveness was a huge issue back then not just for Flash.
Oh no, it is awful that games designed for keyboard and mouse don’t run properly on a phone (which could be easily overcome with virtual overlay) so let’s get rid of 20 years of creative development and replace them with sludge of non portable idiotic mobile games. I can’t name a single “proper” game that came out of mobile phone era that
A) wasn’t a port of a Flash game
B) had something that wasn’t possible with flash
C) can be installed and available as easy as Flash
I remember this! I ported one of my games and indeed got a blackberry tablet. Then I ported another one and gave it to my friend to submit, now he also had one... It was huge for a poor student!
Everything sucks on mobile. Mobile UX is the most unimaginative garbage ever.
After a brief period of creativity, every mobile app regressed to 'search bar on top, list in middile, tabs on bottom' UX. Even this best case UX is mediocre at best.
The fundamental flaw is that touch is imprecise and your finger covers the screen, which is unsolvable without buttons.
The lack of buttons killed all creativity and possibility of having a good UX for games on smartphones.
It was perfectly fine on Symbian phones, and even after the whole iPhone drama, many games for iOS were initially done in Flash, as Adobe added AOT compilation capabilities.
However Adobe decided it wasn't worth it, given how plugins were going on browsers as well.
Fun fact nobody remembers: back in the day Adobe built a feature where you could build flash source to an iphone app - you hit "publish" and an .ipa came out. It worked fine, people made apps, they got accepted to the app store, users used them, etc.
Then a day or so before that feature left beta, apple added a vague new clause to their app store agreement, which made no sense on paper but whose obvious purpose was to disallow flash apps. They then unpublished all the existing flash apps for violating that clause. Adobe quietly cancelled the app publish feature, and a few months later apple quietly removed the clause.
I don’t recall Apple unpublishing my AIR apps. One of mine was among the first secretly submitted before Adobe revealed the feature publicly. However, I definitely remember after Apple added the new clause, when I needed to submit updates, those were stuck in approval limbo for many, many months. Then, suddenly, they all got approved in a flurry and there was never an issue again.
Adobe AIR is actually still available today (now maintained by Harman through an agreement with Adobe), and it can still compile native iOS apps that can be submitted to the App Store. This feature was never removed, and is still maintained to be compatible with new iPhones.
It was something like that the app must have been "originally written" in certain approved programming languages. It basically targeted cross-compilation, but it was written so vaguely that on paper it appeared to even disallow native iOS apps if they started out as a port from some other language.
There was briefly a kerfuffle about it, as people using other cross-compilation tools (xamarin? etc) worried their apps would get removed as well. But IIRC apple never actually enforced the clause, other than to remove existing flash-based apps and reject new ones.
But it did cause vendors of cross-compilers to lay of dozens of staff as the clause killed their business (Source: I work with someone who was laid off because of the clause)
Not only it was possible, it has available during the last years from Flash.
Many Flash haters have no clue that before Unity and friends many of the first generation games on iOS were actually AOT compiled Flash games, despite Apple.
While it is hard to predict an alternative future, the Flash runtime had suffered numerous security issues after all and I agree that a fresh new runtime with any successor to Flash would have been technically much better. Flash really had an excellent authoring tool and a mediocre runtime.
> Even if the battery on the original iPhone could have stood the strain, none of the flash games that existed at the time would have been any fun at all on the phone's tiny screen.
This is still true today - there are very few fun games you can run on a phone. The primary problem is that phones only offer a single control, touching the screen.
I constantly have problems with the crossword puzzle app I have installed on my phone, because I can't reliably touch the right letters on the on-screen keyboard. Flash isn't the problem with putting games on a phone. Flash was a tool that people used to make fun games, but making fun games is pointless if you want people to try to play them on a phone.
> A cheap stylus will solve this for your casual games.
A stylus can solve the problem of not being able to target a point on the screen. It can't do anything about the problem that your game has to run off of a single control. Games need to be able to let the player do more than one thing.
For the longest time, Flash only ran correctly on a Mac running IE5.5 on OS 9, probably because that's what the Macromedia devs all ran/tested with. Anything else, and not only would the frame rate suffer, but Strong Bad's words would gradually desync from his mouth movements. It wouldn't surprise me if critical parts of the Flash plugin were written directly in PowerPC assembly, and then the developers sighed and said "well, we have to port this to WinDoze, so we may as well just rewrite these bits in C++" because x86 gave them the ick and all the cool kids ran a G4 supercomputer with Velocity Engine anyway.
They fixed this some time in Flash's twilight years, and CPUs got so fast that the frame rate issues kind of went away on their own. But making large chunks of the web experience depend on a piece of such flaky, proprietary software was not the wisest move the internet made.
Flash did not run terribly well on OS9 Macs either.
I was working in the Flash animation scene in the 00's and I spent a couple weeks suffering some bugs that only popped up on the Mac editor with large files. Load huge FLA, make a couple edits, Flash 5 crashes. And it somehow manages to crash so hard that it immediately falls over if I try to run it again, I had to reboot the whole damn OS9 Mac. Which was one of those "cool G4 supercomputers". Load huge FLA, make an edit, immediately save, maybe get a couple more edits, crash, reboot, swear, swear, swear. This bug didn't exist in v4 of the editor but there was no backwards compatibility, so we were stuck.
After a while I stopped swearing out loud and just wrote FUCK on a post-it and stuck it to the bezel of my monitor; I think I had a couple of layers of those by the time I was done. Enough to take them off and stick them up on my window and form the word FLASH.
Eventually the studio acquired a Windows box (we were an all-Mac shop) and found that this bug didn't exist on there. We were not happy about this discovery.
Audio sync was terrible across the whole Flash platform too, by default all the audio was not synced with the frame draws, and if a frame took too long to draw it would not skip ahead. There were workarounds to be discovered but they were obscure and often treated as secret knowledge by people who wanted an edge over other animation studios, I never disassembled any Strongbad Emails but I wouldn't be surprised if the Brothers Chaps never found them until they went off to Hollywood for a while.
> But what about game frameworks for web games today? A wasteland. A hundred possibilities and none of them doing a particular stellar job.
This oddly reminds me of another exchange on HN, in which someone said that the state of software tooling for learning Japanese was very good - in that there are a lot of software developers interested in the problem, and therefore there are a lot of tools around that those developers have built - and the counterpoint came up that while Mandarin Chinese really has just one tool available, Pleco is significantly better than every tool that exists for Japanese. The more vibrant competition in Japanese tooling doesn't seem to have produced any benefits.
I can't pretend to have a good diagnosis of why this occurs in modern web game frameworks or in language tooling, but in the language tooling there does seem to be an issue of crowding out - a high-end Chinese-English dictionary is $20,¹² whereas LogoVista's Android edition of the Kenkyusha Green Goddess is $65³ (and if you want English-Japanese in addition to Japanese-English, that's another $65).
LogoVista's app has the UI entirely in Japanese, making it a challenge for Japanese learners. But with the dictionary costing that much, anyone thinking "I can make an English interface for this!" might well decide that licensing the dictionary will prevent them from ever being able to turn a profit.
¹ And every Chinese learner I've ever met, other than myself, won't even pay for that - they stick to Pleco's vastly inferior free dictionary. But even that is infinitely better than what you get in Japanese tools, which use the equivalent of CC-CEDICT.
Flash was kind of terrible, though. It was proprietary and the creation tools were largely inaccessible. Some of the plugins only worked on windows boxes. It had a lot of the same issues java applets had with accessibility. Today's ecosystem should be able to support basically the same creations in a much more portable, accessible, performant format. My understanding is that even the flash runtime itself has largely been ported to html/js/webgl/canvas. So why we don't see this is very curious indeed! It must be the lack of accessible animation studios.
I don't mean to diminish anything you say, of course, it's all true and these flash games are a cherished point of my childhood. But the true loss hasn't been flash itself but the creative tooling that enabled a generation of artists to express themselves and create fun things and the communities that arose around it.
This. I can’t believe so many people fell for the scam claim that flash needed to die for security. No, Apple and Google needed it to die so they could control their respective platforms and rent seek.
It's a fun theory, but the Flash runtime was the #1 cause of Mac OS crashes. Jobs obviously took that — and Adobe's refusal to take that seriously — extremely personally.
The internet has never been as good as it was when flash was at its peak.
Just this past week Trump made a tit of himself on camera with Zelenskyy. If this happened in 2005 there'd already be some minigame out where youd be Zelenskyy fighting JD Vance.
But flash is bad because it's not semantic markup, so instead we have react slop serving reaction videos istead.
Flash was one of the best new technologies of the digital age, allowing nearly effortless creativity with easy tools and low-bandwidth, reliable delivery. It was glorious.
It was overused, terribly, and often used for questionable purposes (e.g., rendering a static website, or the dreaded SIFR). But it was like MySpace in how well and quickly it democratized creativity on the web, except it also afforded motion and games and video. Flash was great.
Adobe is awful, though. I’m not sure if Flash is the most useful thing they’ve killed outright, but it might be. I almost wish I could believe it was intentional, that they bought it to kill it. I really do think it was pure greed and stupidity, though. Most of what Adobe has done in the last 20 years is rent-seeking.
Imagine if they’d been a good steward of the tech, made it stable and performant on low-power devices. Yeah, Steve Jobs put the final nail in the coffin. Adobe administered the poison and tailored the funeral suit. Screw Adobe.
>rendering a static website
2advanced was the epitome of flash design. I don't think I was ever really paying much attention to the content, but it was fun to interact with the UI.
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/2advanced-studios-v1...
EDIT: They're still going!
All on canvas now, but same kinda feel. Makes me think of command and conquer.
https://www.2advanced.com/
Imo Adobe didn't kill it, WC3 or the plugin design did, take your pick.
It wouldn't be too difficult to make something even better than flash that emitted wasm files, that could run everywhere. It would give lots of folks a creative outlet that could be infinitely shared.
If it's so easy, build it.
A portable runtime isn't that hard. An effective and approachable authoring tool is the real challenge.
Yes. The authoring tool was the brilliance of flash. It allowed non-coders to make interactive things really easily.
Anyone whose made an Instagram filter or TikTik effect recently - it was like that, though even easier, but allowing you to do actual coding right down to very low level stuff should you desire.
and you could get push your creation to any screen in the known universe with essentially zero testing.
That program shaped my brain in ways I can't articulate. Took things I learned about computers and animation as an 11yo for granted as basic knowledge.
Flash is the only thing that needlessly ate my battery worse than javascript though.
Pretty sure half the internet surfers had plugins that made flash run only when user activated by the time it started to wane.
Personally I only activated it for games i wanted to play, so most of that creativity was lost on me.
I’m taking about a bit earlier - ie before mobile phones.
Obviously flash was not designed for small screens or small batteries.
But it could have been adapted! If Adobe had been in any way competent or caring the flash runtime could have been converted to html5
But Adobe suck
> before mobile phones.
It was the same even before mobile phones. Laptops had batteries too. CPU fans sounded even worse than today when pegged at 100%.
That was just shonky code, nothing to do with flash itself.
All of it ?!?
I remember the time when pc fans hearable meant 95% that i opened a web page with a flash component by mistake...
Heh, I’ve used that test to guess if someone was running npm.
The flash runtime was pretty efficient but the authoring tools were so easy to use that anyone could produce "working" abominations filled with the most good awful code that got the result they wanted.
I guess there is nothing wrong with javascript either?
Humanity has proven it can't handle anything else than static pages. Then the developers themselves have to pay for their bloat rather than the users.
Having never used the authoring tool, can you point me towards something to model it after?
I think a Bret Victor, "Inventing on Principal" style editor would be perfect, combined with some sort of scratch like Python IDE where each element is defined in terms of its reactive behaviors with other elements on a timeline.
I didn't say easy, I said not too difficult. Order of magnitude difference. :)
https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII?t=634
With some http://lighttable.com/
You can watch some tutorials on Macromedia Flash on YouTube. Here's an example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfHNexSSqfg&ab_channel=JGtut....
IMO, it’s not the technology that matters but the authoring tools. Flash was easy to pirate, sometimes free with school, and easy to use. Thinking of applications as “animations with scripting” was a great idea because it let people only learn what they wanted to.
If you just want to make animations, skip actionscript entirely. If you want some extra Easter eggs, just turn any symbol into a button and you can trigger any movie clip you want. Want to make this a whole game, heres the whole action script editor.
I don't think so, Flash Player was extremely stable and portable, swfs ran accurately (although sometimes slowly) on all targets, Safari, IE7, Nintendo Wii, didn't matter.
Maybe wasm+Canvas is getting close to being stable. But if you code up a webgl game and test it on desktop Chrome, odds are it'll just be a black screen on anything but the most popular Android devices, and you'll need to do tons of work and testing to get it to run on an iPhone.
And WebGPU is probably at least 5 years away from being stable enough to be considered to "run everywhere".
I strongly considered trying to do this a few times, but ended up writing an swf parser in C++ and used Skia to render. It's probably the best we can do right now, but we still regularly get players who complain about just seeing a black screen.
I wonder, how close does Godot get with its web export support? The "authoring tool" seems pretty good, and it exports to WASM.
It doesn't in high-school visual basic seemed to have had a 50% pickup rate based on final project quality (closest I can think of to Godot that I actually saw) , Flash nearly everyone/group had a viable thing to show off for the final project.
Godot is too complicated compared to Flash. Have you ever used Flash? In Flash, you could literally take the brush from the toolbox, draw a circle, and that was your player character. That was it. No importing assets, no creating sprites, no nothing. You literally draw the circle right there with vector art tools, and it can be whatever you want.
And those were THE best vector art tools, because when you drew a shape and the shape overlapped with another, it automatically erased the other shape like you would expect it to in a raster graphics editor. In pretty much every other software I tried, e.g. Inkscape, Affinity, Corel Draw, Illustrator, you just get two separate shape objects one on top of the other. They seem to be designed for drawing the outlines, not to actually paint with brushes. Flash understood what was intuitive for artists.
Honestly, the older I get the stranger I feel about the fact that there was a brilliance in creating interface for people to be productive with back then that seems to be completely gone. I think this may be in part because desktop applications are unusual nowadays, but it's just really strange that the things I remember seeing have been done exactly once and never copied by anybody despite how well they worked.
Building the tech isn’t the problem; getting 90% of Internet users to adopt it is.
Building a good tool is the problem. For instance Git was born in a very niche community (kernel programming), yet it spread like wildfire. Despite the shortcomings of its CLI (according to some), and despite the fact there was other well'established tools.
As someone that would rather use Mercurial and was perfectly fine with Subversion, that wild fire was "Linux kernel uses it, was made by Linus, and I want to be cool like Linus".
Rather than a weird "cult of personality", the fact that Git demonstrated with Linux that it could handle a relatively large amount of source code and allow dozens (hundred?) of programmer to work on it "asynchronously" were key factors for adoption, I believe. If SVN was that good, as it was already well-established online (Github was not the first online VCS frontend, far from it), it should have remained the king of the hill. But it was decapitated instead.
I am been using FOSS and commercial source management tooling since 1998, and the very fact that Linus only bothered with git due to BitKeeper changing their licence, proves that there was nothing special about it, other than personality and adoption wave.
SVN is still king of the hill in game development unless I'm mistaken. Because git is quite bad at handling large/binary files.
Game development often uses commercial solutions like perforce that have central servers so you can lock out your binary files and everyone will know not to touch them at the same time as you.
I think I’ve seen SVN in a single studio in the past decade. It’s almost all Perforce, because of better performance and tooling and the Unreal integration.
And yes, locking unmergeable files is essential either way.
Ah. I forgot about Perforce. I stand corrected
As someone who's worked at a company using Mercurial, the wild fire was that everyone was begging to get onto something better and less opinionated.
Mercurial was slower than a decaffeinated sloth. It lost because it sucked. Sorry.
A side effect of the great idea to write application software in Python that perdures to this day, still it was fast enough for purpose, it isn't like doing SCM operations is akin to 120 FPS for a game engine.
It isn't great that are now so many Git GUI clients written in Electron?
The problem with Python CLI tools is startup time. Just firing up the interpreter and importing modules can take a frustratingly long time if you're a twitchy CLI user. That's much less of a problem for a GUI tool that tends to sit open for a while.
Can you configure them as much as you can configure Git TUI clients? :P
Made by and used by one of the largest open source projects in the world. And built in 5 days.
The new Flash is a whole other pair pants. Also if people want to make easy things for the web in a closed platform, Unity already exists.
The urinal choice game was formative for me.
Flash was also the go-to technology for animation given the bandwidth constraints of that era. Those six episodes were created using Flash and broadcast on TV: http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html
Adobe tried really hard to make Flash work well on mobile.
To the point they gave a free flagship Android smartphone with Flash installed on it to every employee, to try forcing some internal dog-fooding.
No they didn't. I was on the CAB (community advisory board) at the time (from the community side, received an invitation due to being very active on several ActionScript forums etc.)
What was happening is this: Adobe inherited Flex Framework from Macromedia. It was atrocious. Bloated, slow, unusable for games or simple interactive applets which made Flash popular in the first place. They tried to market that for creation of admin tools like what VSPhere used to have. The community was crying and complaining to Adobe that they aren't making any effort to support what Flash was good at.
Then smartphones appeared. And Adobe's engineers came up with Flash Catalyst. Conceptually, it was supposed to work similar to Flash or Fireworks, but it was supposed to render its output into generated Flex Framework code. Tons of unjustifiable bloat. Everything was too slow and too big. And whenever the people able to get their hands on the preview complained about it, the answer was always "it's not going to get faster / smaller".
Catalyst came with templates for "typical" phone apps and they were a disaster to deal with. So slow users would probably understand them to be simply broken / frozen. Oh, but Adobe assigned a bunch of career managers to these projects. People came made a lot of promises and got promoted into another department. It was painful to watch.
At the same time, I wrote a project that I called "Frameworkless MXML", it was more of a demonstration than an actual useful library, but the goal was to say that the original inherited framework might be stripped off a lot of bad components and made to be a lot faster and smaller. But it was just that, a PoC that never went anywhere.
I had no interest in working with Flash on smartphones because I see smartphones as proprietary jails and am not interested in contributing to that market. Few people in Flash OSS community probably also felt distaste for the smartphones... and the vast majority were the "non-contributing" users. They waited until the tower completely crumbled and jumped ship.
An important detail that isn't touched on here: the Flash authoring tools were proprietary and much too expensive for hobbyists to afford. While many users simply pirated the tools, there was still a vast gulf between authors and the much larger audience of players.
The web today is a much more capable ecosystem than "HTML5" was for the original iPhone, and while many web developers crinkle their projects into minified source or opaque WASM blobs, every user has browser developer tools at their fingertips for peeking behind the curtain and making changes live.
It is perhaps most surprising that in the post-Flash world no comparable development environments have sprung up to replace its end-to-end animation and interactivity workflow. Game "engines" like Unity and Godot have captured much of the game development audience for Flash, but their ability to produce web exports is clearly an afterthought, producing huge files, glacial load times, and often simply crashing in any browser that isn't a bleeding-edge instance of Chrome.
I think a few comparable development tools have sprung up, including ours, Construct [1], which is very much web-first.
I think the reason people say nothing replaced Flash is because now there are lots of tools instead of just one, as anyone can target HTML5, so the market has fragmented; and the market has changed, as people develop for app stores and platforms like Steam, so the web isn't as big a focus as it used to be (although it's still important).
[1] https://www.construct.net
Construct is great. I used it to make a game with my daughter. The way it jumps straight to the fun bits and then gives opportunities to learn about programming concepts is great.
I couldn’t bring myself to pay the hefty monthly fee though, knowing my kid’s interest would wane and then her creation would be forever inaccessible unless I continued to pay.
One thing I would have gladly paid for is asset packs, being able to adapt some great sprites and background art would have been a killer feature.
Just to be clear, you can still access your projects without a subscription - it's only editing that a subscription unlocks. We also have a full asset store here: https://www.construct.net/en/game-assets
everybody and their dog had a pirated copy of flash back in the day. i'd bet that there were more users of pirated flash back in the flash gaming heyday than there are unity users today.
I do remember a few kids in high school that were Flash pros pretty early on (as early as 14). I don't recall those kids moving on to actual game development tools. There must have been something very friendly about Flash's onboarding. I'd be curious to know what the equivalent is for kids now days (would be surprising if its Unity/Unreal/Godot). Sort of asking for myself here because I can't for the life of me grasp the UI driven development of Unity/Unreal/Godot.
14 would have been about the age i was playing with it too. in my memory, the magic of flash studio was that you could make something so immediately. it worked well for simple things, you didn't have to make a full-on game, a bunch of kids in jr high computer class could actually make something cool in the length of one class.
The onboarding was that you just start key frame animating and pasting in actionscripts.
I think the fact that it was (acquired early and) developed by the PDF company must have had to do with it. Stupid Flash files were everywhere, but Flash contents that are seriously disappointing from artistic perspectives were rare.
Historically, closed source, expensive corporate software for power users can excel at just grinding out the flaws in user experience until every tiny thing you want to do with it is doable, not because of any elegance in design, generalization, or compositionality, but because a developer sat down and made that specific workflow usable. Matlab, excel, and photoshop are the exemplars of this, the flash editor was up there too.
I forget what it was called and I’m too lazy to look it up, but there was a non Adobe IDE for writing and compiling flash apps using AS3 - it was fine, and it was free, I remember using it for a couple projects, though ultimately I preferred how comprehensive adobe’s software was for publishing .swf
There was also the programming language Haxe which was like a slightly improved version of AS3/JavaScript that could output to .swf
There were many. Some commercial, some opensource. The most popular opensource one was FlashDevelop. At the time, I even wrote some plugins for it.
The most popular commercial competitor of FB was FDT (Eclipse-based plugin, just like Flex Builder).
>It is perhaps most surprising that in the post-Flash world no comparable development environments have sprung up to replace its end-to-end animation and interactivity workflow. Game "engines" like Unity and Godot have captured much of the game development audience for Flash, but their ability to produce web exports is clearly an afterthought, producing huge files, glacial load times, and often simply crashing in any browser that isn't a bleeding-edge instance of Chrome.
This is opportunity. For a startup.
The proprietary tools were only an issue for people who needed the timeline. Games-wise, Both Actionscript 2 and 3 were perfectly usable without Flash. The MTASC compiler was a massive game-changer, and then Adobe released the AS3 compiler themselves, and certainly when I was at a consultancy working on a massive, expensive game, none of us were authoring anything in Flash. Even the designers and artists simply provided image assets.
A few years later, I did use Flash to teach students interactivity (in 2016, I was wondering why myself, but hey, university courses are hardly up-to-date) but there was little other reason to use it.
Today, I still rate AS3 and if there was an LLVM project to output, I don't know, WASM, or similar, I'd try it. Oh, there are?
- https://github.com/bvibber/wasm2swf
- https://ruffle.rs/
Of course, MTASC wunderkind Nicolas Cannasse went off to create https://haxe.org/, which was used quite well on Smart TVs and the like for a while, still used in games. Maybe we already have the answer, but the web is too boring for this stuff.
Macromedia released the AS3 compiler. Adobe inherited it as OSS. Adobe were really reluctant to engage with the community on open-source development issues. They always dragged their feet on Linux support. Eventually, Adobe closed Flex Framework to external contributors, and after they donated it to Apache they undermined the community effort by not releasing the player API library, something that made automatic builds a problem (because the user had to interactively accept EULA to download that SWC).
Eventually, adobe put out the mxmlc tool for compiling as3. I always used it instead of flash.
So I just bought the latest Itch.io bundle for the California wildfires [1]. I bought it partly because there are a few decent "big" indie games on there, but mostly because these mega itch bundles nostalgically remind me of two similar eras in my life: Digging through Shareware CD mega packs, and browsing for weird games on Newgrounds.
The shareware CDs were fun, because they always had enticing titles like "More than 800 games!" or something like that, and as a kid I would dig around the directory structures and play the weird stuff that they had pulled off BBS's. Some of them games would be good, most of them would be pretty mediocre, some would be bad, but it sort of felt like you were unearthing stuff, trying to find an interesting game as you played.
Similarly, I would do the same thing on Newgrounds a lot as a teenager. It was fun to find unique games, especially since a lot of these games really had no ambitions of making money, so they could so a lot of things that you couldn't get away with in retail games. You could make them hyper-violent, or gratuitous sexual content, or just odd humor that wasn't really meant to be understood by anyone but the creator and their friend group.
My first "real" job after dropping out of college was writing Flash and Coldfusion software in 2012, because I had cut my teeth with Actionscript as a teenager. This was after Steve Jobs' infamous letter, but Flash was still more or less relevant, and I'm grateful to have had paying work with it, if only briefly.
[1] https://itch.io/b/2863/california-fire-relief-bundle
I remember as a young kid browsing the aisles of the Microcenter close to our house on the weekends like a kid in a candy shop - 500 games on a single disc for 15 dollars, what sorcery was this? One particular pack was specifically for Windows 3x and all the game concepts were... shall we say liberally borrowed from classics - WinTrek, Wintris, Winroids, you get the idea.
You can actually still find a few of these old mega shareware CDs on Archive.org under the Shareware CD section.
https://archive.org/details/cdbbsarchive
They still kind of exist, but now in the form of crappy ten-dollar knockoff handheld gaming devices that go into e-waste after the first 15 minutes.
Yeah, I remember sometimes they would be really cheap at TJ Maxx of all places, like $5-8. I hated clothe shopping as a kid so my mom would buy them for me occasionally to entice me to put up with trying on a bunch of clothes. I too remember thinking it was magic that they could squeeze so many games in a small space.
A lot of them were definitely ripoffs, but I was young enough to not know about most of the originals at the time, so to me they were all completely original games. It was awesome.
The current equivalent of Flash games is Roblox games.
They also start instantly, and can be created quite quickly. Creators there are often young, experiment rapidly. There are platform-specific trends that someone invents, and which then spread. I fully expect to see new genres and widely known creators being born there.
For instance the creator of the massively popular Steam game "Lethal Company" got their start making Roblox games.
Given how Roblox explores kids as creators, maybe it is about time to folks get mad at them like they feel about Flash and Adobe.
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/09/the-trouble-wi...
This is much worse than whatever Flash has achieved.
*exploits
It’s not an equivalent by far. Flash was democratic. Adobe didn’t dictate what content you can create and there wasn’t a single entity that moderates content. There was pretty wild stuff in Flash with major gore and even porn.
Tell us you’ve not played Roblox, without telling us you haven’t played roblox…
I remember a few peak Newgrounds games from two decades ago more vividly than AAA, 60hr games that 100%'ed a few years ago.
Tom Fulp who made Newgrounds also co-founded The Behemoth and made Castle Crashers, among other games
Different times.
I think the first glimpses of freedom was what made those moments magical.
Now the Internet is even more filled with cool and exciting stuff and I definitely take that for granted.
Even just being able to type "hi" and get another human reply with "hi" was mindblowing. Similar to today but for different reasons.
Anyone remember Miniclip.com? Something I didn't realize at the time was that their "Top 10 List" was not actually based on usage stats, but based on their editorial decisions and decisions of games to pay to be on the list.
I do remember it fondly, but I don't remember ever thinking any of what they show you was necessarily based on usage stats. Iirc there were pretty obvious editorial decisions like the front page having a Halloween theme around Halloween and promoting Halloween-themed games, sometimes fairly obvious re-skins of regular front page games (and similar time-based events around some other holidays).
It also wasn't expected, it was clearly from the pre-web2 era, there was no upvoting, I believe there wasn't even a comment section. There was nothing to really suggest that how you use the site would directly affect how it'll look (beyond influencing the operators). Top 10 games would obviously have meant a similar thing as top 10 stories on a news site - clearly an editorial decision, where clicks and expectations thereof ofc play a role, but it's not an automatism.
It's really interesting how Macromedia Flash software unlocked insane creative potential in so so many people in domains of animation and games. I think nothing ever before or after managed to do anything even remotely similar.
Seeing the testimonials here reminds me of why working in Engineering at Kongregate was one of the most rewarding stops along my career.
I have Flash to thank as my gateway into real programming. I was very young (11 or 12 years old). I created personal project games that really helped me love programming. They were never good enough to be published, but I enjoyed them.
At the time with no guidance, trying to build desktop applications was overwhelming (I couldn't figure out where to start), and building complicated games in the browser with HTML and JavaScript wasn't a thing (there was no HTML 5 or web canvas). Building a real game in a real game engine felt impossibly out of reach for me at the time.
Flash, through ActionScript 2 and 3, gave me that portal to make something real, and taught me all of my fundamentals around loops, functions, arrays, etc. I found a home in StackOverflow and learnt a huge amount. I won't pretend that my games were great, but they really helped to solidify that programming was something that I loved.
Without Flash I don't know that I would be where I am today. I now work as an IC in a huge international company. I didn't go down the game development route as I assumed that I would, as I learnt that my passion was in programming itself and not in just writing games. The Flash games were on my personal website when I applied for internships, and I'm sure I have them to thank in part for helping get me through the door (my interviewer did check out the projects on my website).
I was sad, but understanding, when Flash finally came to an end. It felt like an end of an era for me, despite having not used it for a very long time.
If you got this far, thanks for taking the time to read my reflections!
I was in high school when Flash was most popular. We played all kinds of Flash games during breaks and free hours. In the computer science branch, students were taught Java and Flash as the two main programming platforms :)
I still wish more games, and UI as a whole, had "press tab to see what you can interact with."
Yes it was crazy times. Flash was full of possibilities.
Until Steve Jobs went on the toot horn and told everyone Flash is terrible and it needs to die. No surprise there, old Steve just launched the app store and wanted 30% of every game thank you very much.
Then to everyone's surprise, the Adobe CEO went on TV and agreed publicly that Flash had to go and we're working on better "open" tools.
All flash developers around the world, even "certified" ones like me (lol!), watch in disdain and disbelief. We're HTML5 developers now. Back to backbone and jquery we go!
Long Live Macromedia Flash, and F Adobe. AS3 was OP back in the javascript days where it couldn't parse int properly. Flash got ridiculously fast after years of improvements, and it was unique with this blend of timeline and scripts. Adobe Flex was also a decent web application framework. We don't talk about Director anymore, as well, who was a very powerful tool.
All of that is gone now, replaced by teams of 5 people to do the job of 1, and basically trying to get as productive as we were then.
But what about game frameworks for web games today? A wasteland. A hundred possibilities and none of them doing a particular stellar job.
I still have not found a development platform that's more fun to develop in than Flash.
When I was a teenager, it was almost magic; I could draw a little cartoon, convert it to a movie clip, and export it to code; the fact that Flash was an animation-first program meant that it was really fun to draw with, and its integration with code made it so much more fun.
Now, part of the reason I have such rose-tinted glasses is because I was a teenager while using it, but still, I just don't think anything has had the fun "prosumer" feeling that Flash did. It didn't feel like it was just a "toy", but it also did kind of feel like a toy.
There are some more modern things that are cool, don't get me wrong: Pico-8 is pretty fun, and even more professional things like GDevelop or GameMaker can be fun as well. It just doesn't quite reach to the level that Flash did.
I do understood why the platform died, but I am also kind of sad that it did.
People have pointed out to me that the Flash platform basically still exists with Adobe Animate, AS 3 and everything (including web publishing).
So you can theoretically use the same flow as in your memory. I wish the price was not what it was, and I do not pirate software anymore. And Adobe's tricks when it comes to subscriptions are so nasty. This is a huge barrier to me trying to use Animate for anything, even though I'd probably enjoy it so much.
Timeline-based programming is such a good system for one-offs.
Wait how do you publish stuff written with AS3 and Adobe Animate in 2025? Ruffle?
You can just compile to HTML5 output! It “just works” for some version of “works”.
Interesting, I tried that feature shortly after the first version was released, but it was terrible, even relatively simple animations wouldn't work.
Why do you think the children of Flash were not inspired to create the next generation of that tool?
I’ll throw out one theory:
It attracted the most creative developers and not necessarily the most technical. There is a difference and both belong on a team.
It is a lot of work and does not have much potential to earn money. Simple as that
People, including developers, consistently underestimate work that needs to go into developing good user facing tools. And a lot of that work is not fun, not exciting, just work you have to do.
Almost certainly that's a component.
Still, I wish someone would make a clone of the Adobe Animate program that directly exports to WASM, with all the artsy bells and whistles that I loved about it. Specifically, I would like something that I don't have to pay a monthly fee for forever. It was my first "real" experience with writing code, and I know I'm far from alone with that.
Pico8 and Game Maker and GDevelop and Scirra Construct are still fun, so it's not like there's a shortage of game making toolkits for younger people to get into this stuff. I just miss Flash in particular.
Hmm. You ever just stumble upon your reason for living?
Ha, if you were to make a decent Flash clone I would pay a not-insignificant amount of money for it as long as it’s not a subscription thing. I don’t have enough interest in that level of programming to make it myself.
My theory is that it's hard to create a usable tool in general and even harder if the domain is complex. Interactive animations are pretty complex.
Yeah, there’s some truth to that.
It also doesn’t help that it’s two pronged: Flash is an animation tool and a software development environment.
There are some great animation software packages out there like Toonboom or even something like Moho or Opentoonz, but as far as I am aware they do not have the same kind of direct integration with a programming language like Flash did.
On the other end of the end of the spectrum, you have tools like Game Maker which do have programming as a core feature, but you’re expected to do animations elsewhere and import them in.
So Flash is a competent tool across two complicated domains.
> Until Steve Jobs went on the toot horn and told everyone Flash is terrible and it needs to die. No surprise there, old Steve just launched the app store and wanted 30% of every game thank you very much.
> Then to everyone's surprise, the Adobe CEO went on TV and agreed publicly that Flash had to go and we're working on better "open" tools.
I've got no love for Jobs, but he wasn't wrong. Flash games were a lot of fun, but flash restaurant menus were terrible, and I'm sure the Adobe CEO was tired of pushing security fixes every other week. Also, I thought Jobs contributed to the death of Flash in the browser should be enough times, before third party apps on iPhone OS were a thing at all?
I also don't miss trying to get flash to work consistently on Linux.
Ah yes, famously restaurant websites got so much better after flash died
Wait... I'm hearing that actually restaurant websites still suck but in HTML 5 now
HTML5 is if you’re lucky. Usually it’s a PDF or even worse, a PDF inside some embedded javascript viewer with page turn animations.
Please, flash would have sucked on phones. Even if the battery on the original iPhone could have stood the strain, none of the flash games that existed at the time would have been any fun at all on the phone's tiny screen.
I wrote this [0] in 2010 and it remains my one tech prediction that actually came true.
A good example of where things lie today is StyScrapers[1] - a flash-like game completely implemented in HTML - not in a canvas but with div elements controlled by the physics engine. It runs smoother and uses the browser much better than flash ever could.
[0] https://sheep.horse/2010/2/mobile_safari_does_not_support_fl... [1] https://vole.wtf/styscraper/
It didn't suck. BlackBerry had native API support for Air. You could easily port a Flash game using Air and integrate any native APIs you needed. We gave phones and tablets away to any developer who did this. It worked in the browser natively too without the need to install an extension.
But fuck Adobe because they didn't give BlackBerry the latest runtime.
Adobe killed Flash when they bought Macromedia.
> It didn't suck.
We're talking about a viewer for Flash web content, though, not freshly authored applications.
As point for reference: there was a Flash plugin for Android, for a short while (around 2011-2012). It was awful - not only did a lot of Flash content just not work at all (because it required mouse/keyboard style input), but any content that'd run at all would typically run very poorly on even high-end phones.
I guess I should have prefaced that if it was made with responsiveness in mind and you took from factor into consideration. Anything can suck. Responsiveness was a huge issue back then not just for Flash.
Oh no, it is awful that games designed for keyboard and mouse don’t run properly on a phone (which could be easily overcome with virtual overlay) so let’s get rid of 20 years of creative development and replace them with sludge of non portable idiotic mobile games. I can’t name a single “proper” game that came out of mobile phone era that
A) wasn’t a port of a Flash game B) had something that wasn’t possible with flash C) can be installed and available as easy as Flash
I remember this! I ported one of my games and indeed got a blackberry tablet. Then I ported another one and gave it to my friend to submit, now he also had one... It was huge for a poor student!
Everything sucks on mobile. Mobile UX is the most unimaginative garbage ever.
After a brief period of creativity, every mobile app regressed to 'search bar on top, list in middile, tabs on bottom' UX. Even this best case UX is mediocre at best.
The fundamental flaw is that touch is imprecise and your finger covers the screen, which is unsolvable without buttons.
The lack of buttons killed all creativity and possibility of having a good UX for games on smartphones.
It was perfectly fine on Symbian phones, and even after the whole iPhone drama, many games for iOS were initially done in Flash, as Adobe added AOT compilation capabilities.
However Adobe decided it wasn't worth it, given how plugins were going on browsers as well.
Naturally the Flash hating mob never got this.
Cross compilation to native code from flash runtime was absolutely possible, and absolutely never considered by Apple ;)
Fun fact nobody remembers: back in the day Adobe built a feature where you could build flash source to an iphone app - you hit "publish" and an .ipa came out. It worked fine, people made apps, they got accepted to the app store, users used them, etc.
Then a day or so before that feature left beta, apple added a vague new clause to their app store agreement, which made no sense on paper but whose obvious purpose was to disallow flash apps. They then unpublished all the existing flash apps for violating that clause. Adobe quietly cancelled the app publish feature, and a few months later apple quietly removed the clause.
I don’t recall Apple unpublishing my AIR apps. One of mine was among the first secretly submitted before Adobe revealed the feature publicly. However, I definitely remember after Apple added the new clause, when I needed to submit updates, those were stuck in approval limbo for many, many months. Then, suddenly, they all got approved in a flurry and there was never an issue again.
Adobe AIR is actually still available today (now maintained by Harman through an agreement with Adobe), and it can still compile native iOS apps that can be submitted to the App Store. This feature was never removed, and is still maintained to be compatible with new iPhones.
What was the clause?
It was something like that the app must have been "originally written" in certain approved programming languages. It basically targeted cross-compilation, but it was written so vaguely that on paper it appeared to even disallow native iOS apps if they started out as a port from some other language.
There was briefly a kerfuffle about it, as people using other cross-compilation tools (xamarin? etc) worried their apps would get removed as well. But IIRC apple never actually enforced the clause, other than to remove existing flash-based apps and reject new ones.
But it did cause vendors of cross-compilers to lay of dozens of staff as the clause killed their business (Source: I work with someone who was laid off because of the clause)
And if you tried any sites that used flash on an Android (early days when you could for a while) you'd understand why.
No keyboard: which broke most games.
No mouse: touch is not the same and hard to fake mouse controls with touch while supporting pan or zoom.
Small screen: flash was designed for bigger screens and everything was too small or needed zoom.
Flash wanted to control its event/animation loop: battery life was drained quickly even for basic content.
Mobile didn't kill Flash.
You see the same UI issues when controlling a Remote Desktop from a phone screen. Just difficult.
Not only it was possible, it has available during the last years from Flash.
Many Flash haters have no clue that before Unity and friends many of the first generation games on iOS were actually AOT compiled Flash games, despite Apple.
While it is hard to predict an alternative future, the Flash runtime had suffered numerous security issues after all and I agree that a fresh new runtime with any successor to Flash would have been technically much better. Flash really had an excellent authoring tool and a mediocre runtime.
Sounds like a good candidate for transpilation. Next big thing could be Flash.
> Even if the battery on the original iPhone could have stood the strain, none of the flash games that existed at the time would have been any fun at all on the phone's tiny screen.
This is still true today - there are very few fun games you can run on a phone. The primary problem is that phones only offer a single control, touching the screen.
I constantly have problems with the crossword puzzle app I have installed on my phone, because I can't reliably touch the right letters on the on-screen keyboard. Flash isn't the problem with putting games on a phone. Flash was a tool that people used to make fun games, but making fun games is pointless if you want people to try to play them on a phone.
A cheap stylus will solve this for your casual games. For real games you can try out a Backbone:
https://www.amazon.com/BACKBONE-Mobile-Gaming-Controller-And...
Modern phones are very capable of playing some pretty serious games. It’s fine to get a few accessories as I do agree fingers aren’t ideal.
> A cheap stylus will solve this for your casual games.
A stylus can solve the problem of not being able to target a point on the screen. It can't do anything about the problem that your game has to run off of a single control. Games need to be able to let the player do more than one thing.
For the longest time, Flash only ran correctly on a Mac running IE5.5 on OS 9, probably because that's what the Macromedia devs all ran/tested with. Anything else, and not only would the frame rate suffer, but Strong Bad's words would gradually desync from his mouth movements. It wouldn't surprise me if critical parts of the Flash plugin were written directly in PowerPC assembly, and then the developers sighed and said "well, we have to port this to WinDoze, so we may as well just rewrite these bits in C++" because x86 gave them the ick and all the cool kids ran a G4 supercomputer with Velocity Engine anyway.
They fixed this some time in Flash's twilight years, and CPUs got so fast that the frame rate issues kind of went away on their own. But making large chunks of the web experience depend on a piece of such flaky, proprietary software was not the wisest move the internet made.
Flash did not run terribly well on OS9 Macs either.
I was working in the Flash animation scene in the 00's and I spent a couple weeks suffering some bugs that only popped up on the Mac editor with large files. Load huge FLA, make a couple edits, Flash 5 crashes. And it somehow manages to crash so hard that it immediately falls over if I try to run it again, I had to reboot the whole damn OS9 Mac. Which was one of those "cool G4 supercomputers". Load huge FLA, make an edit, immediately save, maybe get a couple more edits, crash, reboot, swear, swear, swear. This bug didn't exist in v4 of the editor but there was no backwards compatibility, so we were stuck.
After a while I stopped swearing out loud and just wrote FUCK on a post-it and stuck it to the bezel of my monitor; I think I had a couple of layers of those by the time I was done. Enough to take them off and stick them up on my window and form the word FLASH.
Eventually the studio acquired a Windows box (we were an all-Mac shop) and found that this bug didn't exist on there. We were not happy about this discovery.
Audio sync was terrible across the whole Flash platform too, by default all the audio was not synced with the frame draws, and if a frame took too long to draw it would not skip ahead. There were workarounds to be discovered but they were obscure and often treated as secret knowledge by people who wanted an edge over other animation studios, I never disassembled any Strongbad Emails but I wouldn't be surprised if the Brothers Chaps never found them until they went off to Hollywood for a while.
Yeah that's the old, old days, and it certainly was the case of Macromedia being a smaller company back then, limited resources etc.
> But what about game frameworks for web games today? A wasteland. A hundred possibilities and none of them doing a particular stellar job.
This oddly reminds me of another exchange on HN, in which someone said that the state of software tooling for learning Japanese was very good - in that there are a lot of software developers interested in the problem, and therefore there are a lot of tools around that those developers have built - and the counterpoint came up that while Mandarin Chinese really has just one tool available, Pleco is significantly better than every tool that exists for Japanese. The more vibrant competition in Japanese tooling doesn't seem to have produced any benefits.
I can't pretend to have a good diagnosis of why this occurs in modern web game frameworks or in language tooling, but in the language tooling there does seem to be an issue of crowding out - a high-end Chinese-English dictionary is $20,¹² whereas LogoVista's Android edition of the Kenkyusha Green Goddess is $65³ (and if you want English-Japanese in addition to Japanese-English, that's another $65).
LogoVista's app has the UI entirely in Japanese, making it a challenge for Japanese learners. But with the dictionary costing that much, anyone thinking "I can make an English interface for this!" might well decide that licensing the dictionary will prevent them from ever being able to turn a profit.
¹ And every Chinese learner I've ever met, other than myself, won't even pay for that - they stick to Pleco's vastly inferior free dictionary. But even that is infinitely better than what you get in Japanese tools, which use the equivalent of CC-CEDICT.
² https://www.pleco.com/products/pleco-for-android/pricing/
³ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.logovist... ; I'm not sure what the iOS pricing is currently like, but if someone's interested it's available as paid content through https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dictionaries/id1380563956?plat...
To be fair, Flash and Java were having an aggressive competition for enabling the most RCE exploits on end-user systems.
If we'd had the kind of support for sandboxing then that we do now, they probably would've survived a lot longer.
Flash was kind of terrible, though. It was proprietary and the creation tools were largely inaccessible. Some of the plugins only worked on windows boxes. It had a lot of the same issues java applets had with accessibility. Today's ecosystem should be able to support basically the same creations in a much more portable, accessible, performant format. My understanding is that even the flash runtime itself has largely been ported to html/js/webgl/canvas. So why we don't see this is very curious indeed! It must be the lack of accessible animation studios.
I don't mean to diminish anything you say, of course, it's all true and these flash games are a cherished point of my childhood. But the true loss hasn't been flash itself but the creative tooling that enabled a generation of artists to express themselves and create fun things and the communities that arose around it.
This. I can’t believe so many people fell for the scam claim that flash needed to die for security. No, Apple and Google needed it to die so they could control their respective platforms and rent seek.
It's a fun theory, but the Flash runtime was the #1 cause of Mac OS crashes. Jobs obviously took that — and Adobe's refusal to take that seriously — extremely personally.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
Discussed at the time (of the article):
Flash Game History - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23922206 - July 2020 (69 comments)
I have lots of fond memories of playing these mini flash games as a kid :)
This website does not appear to render the games it claims to on Firefox Mobile
What if Firefox were to gain a “SWF viewer”?
It has a PDF viewer already!
It's not built in, but you can install Ruffle as an extension
Sites can load Ruffle on their own too, see https://archive.org/details/flash_loituma
Yep, but I’m talking about reducing friction to zero for viewing an SWF.
Fortunately someone decided to archive all of the flash games so we can play them today:
https://flashpointarchive.org/
The internet has never been as good as it was when flash was at its peak.
Just this past week Trump made a tit of himself on camera with Zelenskyy. If this happened in 2005 there'd already be some minigame out where youd be Zelenskyy fighting JD Vance.
But flash is bad because it's not semantic markup, so instead we have react slop serving reaction videos istead.
This is an absolutely beautiful work of art and it saddens me that it does not have more upvotes.