this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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Greentext

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[–] parzival@lemmy.org 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There's still games, and the old ones aren't dead because the people in middle and high school are still playing them at school, just using flash emulators or html5 versions. People play run 3,slope, Henry stickmin, old version of 1v1 lol without micro transactions, etc. 

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TAKE ME BACK 😭

[–] Loco_Mex@sh.itjust.works 19 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Flash was so good, I'm sad it's gone. The HTML5 era has been a massive let down.

[–] chunes@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

"Hey guys, hear me out... what if we take all these great tools and replace them with... nothing?"

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[–] nek0d3r@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 days ago

Nothing has really changed on this front. Nothing is stopping you from making and playing flash games, and flash itself is just as vulnerable now as when it was still supported. The only thing that's really different is that dropping support seemed like a good excuse to massively shift culture away from it all.

[–] Draconic_NEO@sh.itjust.works 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I don't know anyone who celebrated except maybe the shitstains at adobe who planted the timebomb in Flash Player. Though that was pretty short lived because people found a way around it, either out or necessity (in china) or because they wanted to keep using the Flash projector to play games on Desktop.

For anyone not aware of the workarounds it was likely pretty shitty for people who needed or want to use software that depends on Flash Player.

Of course now we have ruffle.rs but it still isn't perfect, and there is still software that relies on unimplemented functions. Hopefully those get resolved soon.

[–] Echolynx@lemmy.zip 10 points 2 days ago

There is a Flash-animated webcomic I read years ago that really excelled in the medium. Thank goodness for Ruffle, or it would be lost forever.

[–] SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 days ago

All the web developers I know did a little jig that day. YMMV

[–] Passerby6497@lemmy.world 32 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I only celebrated the downfall of flash because it was an insecure piece of shit software. It just happened to have people make a ton of fun and interesting content on it.

[–] qarbone@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, this post is celebrating Flash like it enabled creativity when jt was just the popular framework. That era didn't die because Flash went away. Companies killed that era and propped up parts of its body to trick people.

[–] Passerby6497@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

While yes it is, but I was responding specifically to the 'celebrating its downfall' part, which we should have because flash was insecure as fuck.

As I noted, there were a ton of fun and interesting items people made for it, and you can even still find them out on the net to relive those days and even see new shit on places like newgrounds. But let's not pretend that flash itself didn't need to die well before it did.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 70 points 3 days ago (3 children)

We celebrated the downfall of Flash because every other week, some horrible vulnerability was found. And because of the ease of distribution in games, it was super easy to jack people's computers.

What killed the prevalence of all these wonderful free games was developers' ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.

[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days ago

Plus those of us on Linux desktops didn't love the workarounds we had to do with gnash or whatever. The rise of the mobile device cemented the need to have open web standards not tied to proprietary formats and proprietary software.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago

A bunch of the original flash games just got straight ported to Steam (or the various Apple/Google Play stores).

You can buy them for a few bucks and play them to your heart's desire. Or find pirated copies and sideload them.

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[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 101 points 3 days ago (19 children)

We absolutely didn't celebrate its downfall. Flash had issues, but the culture of flash games was awesome.

That said, indie games are way better these days

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[–] Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world 141 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Who the fuck celebrated? I remembered many pissed off millennials and Gen x

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 52 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The people mistakenly claiming html5 was going to be the next Flash, I guess

[–] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 68 points 3 days ago (3 children)

It... Is? Check out itch.io and there's still.shitloads of browser games around.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 35 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Well ok, I guess it eventually got there, but at the time Flash was getting shut down there wasn't any equivalent self contained game engine IDE that compared, it was a big setback.

[–] Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 24 points 3 days ago

All those flash games got preserved and you can still play them:

https://flashpointarchive.org/

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[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 34 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I did, flash was a pile of garbage especially on anything not windows

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

I'm not a fan of Steve Jobs but here he was just laying down facts

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[–] DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz 20 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Funny that Club Penguin made it into the picture. It's one of the earliest games I can remember that pushed subscriptions and micro transactions and was aimed heavily at young children.

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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 43 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

Nothing except for the use of Flash has changed... There are still tons of free to play games without MTX or other greedy bullshit made by passionate people, and just like back in the day, 90% of them are straight doodoo.

FFS, Newgrounds is still around and gets new stuff posted daily. Anon should leave 4chan and check out the rest of the internet.

[–] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

The issue is anon's peers on 4chan called itch dot io "full of indieslop", now anon cannot get themself to check what it has, because the games don't feature slurs and racial stereotypes, for "comedic" purposes.

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[–] you_are_dust@lemmy.world 32 points 3 days ago (3 children)
[–] rockstarmode@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days ago

Who celebrated? Everyone at the time who wasn't trying to write flash exploits did

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[–] 58008@lemmy.world 76 points 3 days ago (3 children)

You can still do this. There're loads of free and basic (i.e. easy-to-learn) game engines and you can make games of much better quality with the same effort. itch.io is full of free games made by amateurs.

When people celebrate the downfall of Flash, it's not because of the games. It's because the entire internet was replete with unnecessary Flash-heavy bullshit that required constantly updating your browser's Flash plugins (and all browsers had their own version you had to install and update), and how it was completely unsuited to any sort of UI/UX (e.g. you couldn't even copy and paste text in Flash pages most of the time). And all that is to say nothing of the gaping goatse of a security hole that it was.

It was cancer. Just because the cancer got you down to your goal weight, it doesn't mean you should lament the success of your chemotherapy.

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[–] agent_nycto@lemmy.world 29 points 3 days ago (4 children)

I don't remember a single person being happy with Flash going away

[–] Limonene@lemmy.world 20 points 3 days ago

Flash had a ton of vulnerabilities. It felt like one zero-day RCE per year.

Flash never had a good FOSS implementation until years after Flash Player was discontinued.

I was very happy about the death of Flash Player, but neutral on the death of the Flash format.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I didn't celebrate per se, but Flash was incredibly insecure and HTML5 was good enough for most of these simple games and it came out in... 2008, so 13 years before Flash went EOL.

What I did celebrate was finding out that Ruffle is a thing and most of your old favourite Flash games websites use it now so you can play your old favourites again! It's also open source and written in Rust so everything necessary to give the programmer nerd in me a boner.

[–] smeenz@lemmy.nz 6 points 3 days ago

I was happy.

[–] SunshineJogger@feddit.org 9 points 3 days ago

I was a flash dev back then. People were very happy because of no more plugin need, no more badly scripted flash-ads that ate 100% cpu, etc.

Also Apple......

[–] Meron35@lemmy.world 41 points 3 days ago

It never died though? The Devs just pivoted to different platforms. Itch, Newgrounds, and even the major app stores have endless content from indie devs.

Flash games were just never mainstream enough. And let's not forget that the most popular flash games were those shitty FB games, like FarmVille and Candy Crush, or that the shitty mobile games all started off as clones/ports of already popular flash games, like Angry Birds/Crush the Castle.

[–] antsu@discuss.tchncs.de 52 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

However, consider: if Flash was still popular, by this point Adobe would have enshittified it to hell and back to milk its customers. It would no longer be the thing you miss.

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[–] Muffi@programming.dev 66 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The amateur game dev community is thriving like never before. Itch.io has become Newgrounds on steroids, full of incredibly creative, fun and free games.

People like to complain about what has been lost on the modern internet, without spending any time actually looking and trying out the new niches.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

How are you finding decent free games on itch? Every time I go it's a flood of visual novels, shit "horror" games, or whatever the latest streamer bait is but poorly copied 1000 times. And the filtering tools are just limited enough that I can't seem to get a good "feed" going.

Newgrounds was far from a neverending fountain of pure quality, but I feel like finding quality stuff on it is an order of magnitude harder than it used to be in the days of flash. Used to be curated lists and sites with new quality stuff like every week.

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[–] AffineConnection@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Mata Nui Online Game

[–] makeitwonderful@lemmy.today 37 points 3 days ago

Flashpoint Archive is attempting to archive all the flash games and animations.

[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 28 points 3 days ago (10 children)

People who have no clue what they're talking about be like:

I mean, seriously... Celebrating FLASH of all things? And complaining that there are no more free amateur games? MF, never heard of Unity? Godot? O3DE? Defold? GDevelop? OGRE? renpy? pygame? stride?

The worst of these still being infinitely better than Flash. And then you can publish your work at Itch.io.

[–] Visstix@lemmy.world 21 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I think they are just celebrating the era. The Internet was completely different then. A lot of those flash games later turned into microtransation shit as well on new engines.

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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 9 points 3 days ago

I hate shit like this. Fym we celebrated it's downfall?? Excuse you?? I was not happy about it.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 36 points 3 days ago

To those asking "who celebrated"...Linux was not always well supported by Flash. The promise of HTML5, with first class Linux support, was very appealing.

https://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/flash-installer-confusion.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3620537

[–] EfreetSK@lemmy.world 31 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

It wasn't about the technology, it was the zeitgeist of that era. If HTML 5 was available at the time, people would code in that

[–] stringere@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)
[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 19 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I heard somewhere that Flash itself is garbage (not the games in it)

[–] tetris11@feddit.uk 19 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It had massive security holes, but its vector handling is sublime

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[–] rozodru@piefed.world 17 points 3 days ago (2 children)

yeah it was fine to play games on or see neat websites but it was absolute garbage to build and maintain with.

fresh out of college one of my first jobs was a web master for an ad agency whose site was purely built in flash/actionscript. It was the absolute worst to update. I hated it. I was one of those that celebrated flash and actionscripts downfall.

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