Over 36,000 Flash Games Saved Offline by Flashpoint | Game Rant
In 2017, Adobe announced that Flash would no longer be supported as of December 31st, 2020. With the software's discontinuation, tens of thousands of games and animations made in Flash would be lost if not for the efforts of a team by the name of BlueMaxima and their project Flashpoint.
Flashpoint is an archive of over 38,000 games and 2,400 animations, saving an important part of internet history, video game history, and many people's cherished memories. The program, which can run on thirteen platforms, also supports Adobe's Shockwave, HTML5, Java's Applets, and Unity Web Player.
A little over a decade ago, animations and games made in Flash were a ubiquitous staple of internet media, with a host of sites like Newgrounds, Miniclip, and Armor Games sprouting communities around them. At the time, students playing Flash games were a common sight in school computer labs around the world. While Flash eventually lost favor to gaming platforms like Steam and the mobile game market, due to their ease of monetization and massive user bases, many creators started their careers on Flash, making relatively simple games for free on the internet. Many popular games now available on iOS, Google Play Store, and Android, in addition to the creators of these apps, were once part of the popular world of Flash.
For the games that never made their ways onto other platforms, however, Flashpoint will preserve them. Anyone can suggest games to BlueMaxima for archival, and creators have the ability to ask that their games be taken off of Flashpoint. However, because these games would otherwise become unplayable, requests for removal seem to be exceedingly rare.
The entire archive of games and animations takes up a gargantuan amount of storage space, sitting at approximately 290GB. Thankfully, a vastly smaller option is available, which allows users to simply download the games and animations as they choose to play them.
Though Flash's discontinuation is a sad close to a wonderful, storied world of games and media, it's a comfort to know that the door to its legacy remains slightly ajar to welcome in visitors, new and old. Those whose memories are full of Age of War, Super Mario Crossover, and Raft Wars have a lot to be thankful to the volunteers at Blue Maxima for, who are keeping those games from becoming nothing more than memories.
Sources: bluemaxima.org, Kotaku
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