By the end of this year, Adobe will stop maintaining Flash Player. Flash has dominated the tech market in the 2000s, providing the environment to launch games and view multimedia files. However, failing to catch up with the changes in the industry, by the 2010s, Adobe's product started becoming the sick man of the software industry. In a couple of weeks, Flash will be relegated to the dustbin of history. Despite its sad fate, Flash has left an extraordinary legacy in Internet culture, especially in the gaming industry.

Flash games are the first games I remember playing. There were simple stickman fighting games, car racing challenges, and 2D motorbike guys trying to ride through bumpy roads.  My favorite game was “Yetisports”, where you literally play as a Yeti taking part in absurd sports Olympics. In one of the game series, you play golf in the African savannah; except for a ball you hit a penguin, and instead of a club, you use a flamingo. With basic 3D graphics and awkward animations, these games were simple, and yet they attracted millions of people.

Not only could you play games, but you could also easily create a game yourself. Making games in Flash was quick and low-cost. Flash was able to run across different platforms, and games did not need to be updated to fit the more up-to-date systems. A game made in 2000 can still be played today. This way, developers did not have to worry about maintaining the game after the release, allowing them to easily switch to developing another game.

Building Flash games was a numbers game — the more you create, the more chances you have to go viral. This impacted the way people produced the games. Instead of opting for in-depth high quality games, creating simple but weird games offered a better pay-off. There were arcade-like games slightly more complex than Tetris, and there were comically brutal, grotesque games like the Kill Bill simulator. Troll games were also going viral on the web. Such was the case with “KBS”, short for Kill Britney Spears, which was just pictures of Britney Spears with poorly drawn Paint animations of blood and bullet wounds appearing as you click the button. Released in 2000, it took just 2 minutes and 32 seconds to make the game. The game was played over three million times on Newgrounds.

This number, however, is far from the actual number of times the game was played. In the 2000s, the decentralized nature of the Internet meant people could play the games on many websites, and if the game fails on Newgrounds, it can still go viral on a different website. This made Flash game developers less dependent on hosting platforms. To modern game developers who have to comply with the rules of Steam and App Store, such freedom seems unimaginable. Since anyone could make a game and upload it to any website, the freedom of expression was unlimited. Without Flash, the existence of companies like Molleindustria would be impossible — the company created dozens of provocative socio-political games, such as “Operation: Pedopriest”, where as a church, the player had to cover up sex scandals. The studio became notorious for another game, “McDonald’s Videogame”, a parody on the corporate world, where a player could bribe politicians and cut down rainforests to earn as much money as possible. These days, such games would be immediately removed for copyright infringement, defamation, and many other reasons. 

Despite its immense popularity and ease of use, Flash was far from perfect. People criticized Flash for poor performance, immense battery consumption, and vast security issues. The constant annoying reminders to update Flash player became a meme. In 2010, Steve Jobs published a letter explaining why Apple would not use Flash. This marked the beginning of the end for the technology. Developers started switching to other formats, making mobile games on iOS and Android. Attempts to revive Flash failed, and in 2017, Adobe announced that it would stop supporting Flash after December 31, 2020.

Flash games to the Internet were like Prometheus’s fire to the people. They helped to explore the uncharted territory of the gaming industry by giving people the tools to make games they want. It was a purely creative process, where games were created for the sake of games, and not for profit. Seeing the seemingly everlasting presence of Flash games getting trampled by corporate needs is a bitter but inevitable stage of history. The creators of Flash games have moved on, with some of them creating iconic mobile games like “Angry Birds”, and others forming the core of modern indie games. As for the Flash games themselves, they will not vanish completely. The Internet Archive, a public digital library, announced that it will preserve thousands of Flash games on its website, emulating the environment so that there is no need to use the original technology. Flash games have remained active for 24 years and now, they have to go, reminding us that nothing lasts forever. While not many people will mourn their loss, many will fondly remember their existence.