this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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[–] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 29 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Are flash games still a thing? I remember those old sticky fighting flash games on newsgroupe.

Someone kind enough in webdev to elaborate why someone would care to revive/reimplemente old flash player tech?

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 63 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Adobe Flash Player was deprecated some years ago, so there is no longer any functioning official software that can play Flash games. The modern equivalent are mobile games.

The reason why reimplementing it is a worthy thing to do is to preserve old software, same reason why console emulators exist.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No, the modern equivalent is Web HTML5 games.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

From a technical point of view you are right. But commercially, I am pretty sure many companies and developers that used to make Flash games now make mobile games. There are many mobile games that are ports of old Flash games.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 9 months ago

I see mobile games as the commercial successor of Facebook games. But the spirit of flash games stated in the Web scene for sure.

[–] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml -4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Some? It was more than 10 years ago iirc.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 25 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Wikipedia says at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#End_of_life that the EOL was announced in 2017 and took effect in 2020, much less than 10 years ago.

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 9 months ago

Same section also has this:

In November 2011, about a year after Jobs' open letter, Adobe announced it would no longer be developing Flash and advised developers to switch to HTML5.

You can see why someone might think it was ten years ago based off this.

[–] WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago

Yeah but it was an unsecure piece of shit for more than the past decade

[–] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I remember much earlier announces.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It was on its way out when smartphones and HTML5 became widely adopted. Smartphones didn't support Flash and HTML5 made sure that the things you used to need Flash for were just implemented in web browsers. Maybe you remember something along those lines.

[–] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago

What I remembered was abandoning Linux NPAPI Flash plugin in 2012. The PPAPI plugin indeed existed for longer time.

[–] sleepyTonia@programming.dev 46 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Game and media preservation, for one. But I'm sure part of it is the technical challenge. There's still websites where you can download those old flash games to run them locally, but one day Adobe Flash player will cease to work on modern operating systems.

[–] luca@lemmy.today 26 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Exactly. Flash was hugely popular, there's a wealth of content, media, projects and entire websites made with Flash (not just games) that would otherwise be lost and this unbelievable effort brings all that content back to life.

[–] jaykay@lemmy.zip 1 points 9 months ago

I miss the old flash games honestly

[–] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 5 points 9 months ago
[–] Onihikage@beehaw.org 17 points 9 months ago

Adding to sleepyTonia's comment, many flash games have been preserved through Flashpoint Archive, which is like an epic DRM-free Steam client for flash games (as well as other web game technologies, like the shockwave player). However, Flashpoint uses old flash player binaries that, as stated, may one day stop working as hardware and operating systems evolve. If that happens, it'll be great to have a replacement interpreter ready to go that can be compiled to run on newer tech.