For a long time, the internet was filled with games and animation all built-in Flash. But when this year ends, Flash will die as nearly all major web browsers will remove Flash support on Dec. 31, 2020. Luckily, all that content won’t be lost thanks to Flashpoint, a project which has saved over 36,000 Flash games from disappearing forever.
Back in 2017, Adobe announced that it would stop supporting Flash at the end of 2020. The company spent the last three years working with other tech firms like Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google to make the transition as smooth as possible. And while many games and apps have moved to HTML5 or Unity, many other games haven’t made the jump to newer, safer technology. And with less than a year left, most never will.
That’s where Flashpoint comes in to save a huge chunk of gaming history. Flashpoint uses open-source tech to allow folks to download and play a large list of games and animations. The full list contains just over 36,000 games and you can suggest new games to be added if something you love isn’t on here.
The folks running this project will pull games if the copyright holder or original creator requests that, but it seems this isn’t happening much. Which is great. Flash games might seem like silly and weird mini-games today, but a decade ago they probably made up half of the games I played. If you went to a school with a computer lab anytime in the last 15 years or so, you probably spent way too many hours playing Flash games on sites like Miniclip.
And while Flash games might not be as impressive today, they are still an important part of gaming history. These small web games can be directly linked to the later rise of mobile and indie games and helped many creators get their feet wet with building and creating video games.
Over at Flashpoint’s website you can find a section where you can download the full collection. It does take up nearly 290GB of space, but you can also download a smaller version that only downloads games as you play them if you want to save room on your hard drive.
(Updated 3/3/22 with new details)