Sorting through them to find the ones you liked could be a bit of a challenge. The bar to entry was very low to non-existent and the more popular ones had a lot people submitting to them, so the collections soon had hundreds or thousands of games. These collections are huge! Of the ones I have mentioned, Nitrome’s is the smallest by an order of magnitude or so. I also want to mention Nitrome, a game studio that created their own site and produced over 100 solid games on their own. Newgrounds was probably the largest site and Kongregate has possibly held up the best as the years have gone by. I got my start on Miniclip but probably spent the most time on Armor Games. Many of these games were collected on Flash game sites. Over the years, however, a lot of games were created. Flash will soon truly be history as many browsers have declared they are going to get rid of it by the end of 2020. Then people found it was surprisingly good at making games and, as they say, they rest is history. In the early days Flash gained popularity because the files were small and downloaded quickly. And most browsers come – or rather came – packaged with it. You can use it to create games, play them locally on your computer, or in your browser. By the time I became aware of it its purpose had shifted from a simple animation tool to a platform for web games.įlash is the editor, player and browser plugin for. It changed owners and names over the next decade. Flash was created in 1995 by FutureWave and was called FutureSplash Animator at the time. I had to look up things about the early days. About Flashīefore getting into the games, I would like to talk about Flash itself. For one last bit of praise from an unremarkable fan: here is what I have to say about Flash. It had a good run all things said – a run that was a quarter century long – but it is definitely getting into its twilight years now.
Most were made by a few people in their spare time and most were completely free, so you got plenty of weird idea-focused arcade experiences, puzzle games with a twist, smaller adventure and a lot of art games. Well before the modern indie game scene got started, hobbyists produced hundreds of games that you can still find scattered across the web. You will not find much in the way of beautifully rendered 3D graphics or epic open worlds, but there are other treasures to be found.įlash is a browser plugin that allows websites to display animations and games. There is a huge collection of games I look back upon fondly.
Admittedly, my part was primarily as an observer, but that was enough for Flash to leave a significant mark on my gaming history. But for a time it was the root of one of the largest and most open gaming communities in existence. To many people Flash may just be an annoying internet thing-a-ma-bob that updates frequently.