> Nowadays, games like the McDonald's Videogame, where you corrupt politicians and destroy the rainforest to make fast food, would most likely be banned from the App Store, cutting it off from a large percentage of players.

Brings up a good point of the old WWW: we expected to have to navigate a number of sites to source content, and it was good! I remember having to surf Ebaumsworld, Newgrounds, and a bunch of direct content-creator sites to play a whole slew of games.

At Leaning Technologies, we are working on preserving _all_ flash content by running the original x86 Flash plugin via WebAssembly virtualization (CheerpX). If you want to read more:

https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-...

https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with...

A presentation about the architecture of the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JUs4c99-mo

Feel free to drop me any question: https://twitter.com/alexpignotti

Hi everyone! I wrote the article. It's great to see it shared here on HackerNews. The people buildings today's tools and technologies are exactly the people that I want to reach!

So many developers still feel like Flash was the most amazing thing that ever happened to them in their creative careers.

For building today’s platforms and technologies, it is important to remember what made Flash great, but it is at risk of being forgotten because Flash will no longer be supported after December 2020.

I’d like to spread the message to influence and inspire the next generation of tool creators!

It is such a shame that no modern game development tool comes close to Flash in terms of ease of use, development speed, and integration of art+animation (I say this as someone who worked as a professional Flash developer for 5 years and then spent a decade working in Unity).

This is missing a pretty big chunk of the end-game(s) of Flash: social network gaming. All of the top Facebook games were using Flash. We built the engine for FarmVille, CityVille, etc. using ActionScript3. Our artists would author the animations and sprites in the Flash editor and we'd be able to drop them in seamlessly into the game.

Additionally, PC/Console 2D & 3D games were using Flash to author and render their UIs for a very long time via ScaleForm. They only discontinued it in 2018.

Flash gaming became much bigger than Newgrounds and had massive influence on how to build future WYSIWIG tools to empower designers and artists.

Newgrounds will always have a special place in my heart. I remember learning flash over the summer on a lark and porting a game a friend of mine had originally written in Q-basic. It was the first time I'd ever "shipped" something and Newgrounds was where I launched it. The game ended up on the frontpage which at the time was a huge deal. From there, my game started showing up all over the web at various flash game websites. One site offered me $50 for a non-exclusive license which for a college kid was fantastic! Paid for a nice dinner and drinks for me and my friend. Its neat seeing the game show up in the top 2000 as well.

Game in question is Roadblocks for anyone interested https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/192217

Flash cartoons were also a big deal, off the top of my head: Homestar Runner, Happy Tree Friends, Family Guy, Harvey Birdman, Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends, Squidbillies, Metalocalypse, and tons more.

For all the problems with Flash, we definitely lost a lot when we dropped it.

Is there any easy to use, safe flash game preservation project?

I remember some project that seems to require you to download the entire 1 TB torrent and/or some sort of custom launcher, but nothing that focuses on trying to translate games into JavaScript (or WASM, or something else that lets you go to a web site and start playing right away), or just provide ZIP files that you can drop into a VM with an old browser.

Edit: The project I know of is https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ and seems the most promising so far that I've seen. It's windows-only, the sandboxing seems sketchy (seems to explicitly make changes on the host then try to revert them), and the launcher is almost 2 GB, but I suspect it's the best we have right now.

I wasn't much into games but wrote a lot of ActionScript. Some such as the video engine for Vongo (STARZ), quite a bit for Walt Disney, and Educational tools for Pearson Publishing, and few thingies for Nokia.

Let me tell you a story.

So, there was a gathering of supposedly some of the best ActionScript developers in the world in the Macromedia office in San Francisco (just as they were about to be acquired by Adobe). These developers were the ones that wrote libraries the world uses, best game developers, et al.

One of the talks was by Gary Grossman, the father/inventor of ActionScript. He starts off by saying in the lines of, "I'm going to go a bit technical in this."

Well, we heard him talk about things after which we begin to think if he was talking about ActionScript or something else. We looked at each other, “We are all n00bs here.” ;-)

As a game developer it feels like _nothing_ has replaced flash; sure, there have been attempts to recreate the ease of creation, but the surrounding community was as much flash as the tech itself.

10 years later WebAssembly is still trying to match this

https://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/

Unreal Engine 3 demo on CrossBridge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y

While trying to play the safe card,

"Everything Old is New Again: Binary Security of WebAssembly" - USENIX 2020

http://www.software-lab.org/publications/usenixSec2020-WebAs...

And no other tool is yet to match the tooling capabilities of Flash.

Great piece of work, seems to focus completely on NewGrounds, which, as a Flash games developer from 1999-2009, I had not heard of back in the day. There were Flash games EVERYWHERE from b3ta to Orisinal. We wrote games for clients and were paid for doing so, and these often had decent marketing budgets behind them to popularize them, had competitions attached and the like. The biggest was for LBi and British Gas, Generation Green, where we threw everything including the kitchen sink at the game, Box2D, particle emitters, level editor for our game designer, everything. It was pretty amazing. In the end I was working on Facebook games for Square Enix, which was - for me - the beginning of the Free-to-play genre but monetization behind the surface for extras. What a time. Way more fun than it is now.

this website almost made me cry. It was a magical time to learn to program games, with such a low barrier of entry. I loved it so much, it helped me through a horrible childhood. I no longer feel like I want to make games but I will never forget the way it felt to be part of that community. I'm so glad this project is here to honor it and remind me of it.

Has there been much of an effort to make something to convert a Flash animation/game into HTML/JS? Certainly anything ActionScript could do, JS could do as well, right?

Really great work here. I love the way the visualizations are laid out, and the subject is near and dear to me. I often think about getting back into making games/movies and/or creating a Macromedia Flash 8 clone in the browser. I loved how there were just a few simple concepts such as frames, tweens, movie clips, and an asset library that you could tie together with js-like code to make whatever you wish.

Probably most won't remember Fantavision for the Apple II, I loved making animations with it and then became an early adopter of Flash, programming AS1 to AS3 websites and car customization apps for General Motors. The last cool thing I did with it was 3D graphics, then moved to Unity.

Interestingly the first versions of Unity game engine included support for Javascript as a way to bring Flash devs into their product.

What an amazing, nostalgic site! Flash was definitely ahead of its time. I recall the pure excitement of the early Flash days in 1999. It was a perfect storm of a having simple to use tool with easy distribution, combined with being on the cusp of major increases in Internet usage and bandwidth. The Internet was ripe for a change and Flash offered a perfect combination of vector drawing, animation, development and distribution tools.

I vividly remember my first experience with Flash: watching an artist use a Wacom tablet to draw and animate a cartoon using vector brushes, the timeline, onion-skinning and then adding sound and publishing all from his laptop. As a web developer pushing out HTML pages with single-pixel gifs and tables, this was eye-opening. I worked heavily with Flash over the next few years and it really opened my eyes to the power of animation and motion graphics on the web.

Remember those madness animations? And that madness flash game? I loved that shit when I was 12.

I've seen some other people in the comments mentioning Roblox[0]; the creator of the McDonalds Videogame mentioned on that website is a CMU professor who recently explored some Roblox games on his twitter[1]. It definitely feels like Roblox is the platform that will inspire future generations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox

[1] https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/128375548540196045...

I don't think any of the new development platforms have gotten even close to how accessible it was to make games in flash - pre as3 was the perfect combination of ease of art creation and programming

I can't believe it doesn't mention Kongregate.com

That's the site that really roped me into programming... and illustrating with a Wacom!

Can anyone recommend Flash games I should try out? I feel like I completely missed out on this scene.

I miss Flash

Is anyone doing a WASM flash por