How Flash games influenced the gaming industry, created the mobile market, died and were reborn. Lyrical Essay

A whole generation of gamers grew up with Flash games. This technology shaped the mobile gaming market, becoming home to the first indie developers and shaping several genres. We remember what influenced the Flash player, how the technology was born and died, and what replaced it – everything is in this material.

The first Flash player was released in 1996. It was used to create website animations and primitive web graphics. As the technology grew in popularity, websites changed, Flash also evolved, and in 2000, its creators introduced a full-fledged programming language into it – ActionScript.

At the same time, enthusiasts began to create their own games, the NewGrounds website appeared on the Internet, and anyone could post their creation there or share their opinion on an existing game.

Now many game engines are code and then graphics. With Flash it was different. The authors of the games literally drew the game – they created the backgrounds, drew the characters and the environment. Then animation came into play and only then were the movements on the screen supplemented by lines of code.

The first games were quite primitive – a few control keys, static scenes. Sometimes the most “viral” Flash projects were those where famous politicians and media personalities awkwardly danced to popular music in various poses.

The first versions of Flash were a tool for freedom of expression. Not everyone tried to make full-fledged games that would captivate for hours.

On different sites you could find various interactive comics, animations, simple games in which you had to beat someone with improvised objects, applications in the style of “Don’t press this button!” and interactive jokes.

The second half of the 2000s can be called the “Golden Age” of Flash games. Sites with them became extremely popular, the income of these sites and, most importantly, the income of developers grew, and the toolkit developed – there were toolsets and libraries that made the development process faster and easier.

It was during the “golden era” that Flash prototypes of many famous indie projects were born: super meat boy, Isaac’s binding, castle crashers, My friend Pedro, Fancy Pants Adventures, Swords and Souls: Neverseen, Swords and Sandals, cookie clicker, Samorost.

Over the years, they all got releases on other platforms and devices, sequels and changed a lot. But the very first versions of these projects were presented to the public as Flash games.

At the same time, many projects not only received sequels, but also created or popularized an entire genre. For example, the popularity of Cookie Clicker forced other developers to pay attention to the rather unpopular genre of idle games at the time – clickers.

Rebuild practically formed mobile economic strategies, Happy Farmer gave us the opportunity to dig in the garden and wait hours for the carrots to ripen. Canabalt became the first of thousands of runners and even ended up in the collection of the New York Museum Pac Man and Tetris. a Bejeweled basically gave the world the match-3 game.

But in the early tenth century, with the growing popularity of smartphones, Flash “fell bad.” The technology became too heavy for portable devices of the time, did not want to adapt to new market conditions. Apple refused to launch Flash projects, justifying it with security vulnerabilities and increased battery consumption.

Adobe, who owned the technology at the time, tried to “reanimate” it by adding 3D support, integrating with Unity, and releasing several updates. But in vain.

Of course, Flash’s “death” didn’t happen overnight. Still cool games appeared, ad revenue was coming, but with the growing popularity of Google Play, Steam and the emergence of new players in the games market, the number of visitors to sites with Flash projects fell. In 2013, due to low incomes, the world of Flash games collapsed – there was nothing left to pay developers. Gradually, large sites that lived thanks to Flash began to close, and developers switched to other game engines and platforms.

In 2017, Adobe announced it would end support for the technology after three years, in 2020:

On December 31, 2020, Flash “left” the internet forever. But his legacy remains.

And the developers became the main legacy of the Flash player. They certainly haven’t “collapsed” with technology. Someone went to another branch, but many switched to other engines and continued to create games, continuing to create their projects independently.

Perhaps the backbone of the former “flash players” has shaped the image of the indie market. Above we have already mentioned many games that are considered gems of the indie sector: Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac, Castle Crashers. They were all made by people who had made Flash games before.

Flash gave enthusiasts an insight into development processes, gave them the necessary skills, but most of all, it gave them the insight that it is possible to release a commercially successful project without the support of a major publisher.

Someone transferred their work to a new engine and released it on Steam, someone published and searched for a team on itch.io and similar sites. In general, despite the presence of giant gaming companies that released AAA projects, people were confident that it was possible to create only worthy projects that would become known to the whole world.

Another industry where you can see Flash’s legacy is the mobile games market. Runners, farms, economic strategies, small “addictive” games and well-developed RPGs – we’ve seen all this in the browser.

Yes, the developers had to adjust the controls and rework the integration of advertisements, but the gameplay mechanics, the visuals, the already known series – all this migrated from computer screens directly into the hands of mobile gamers.

The techniques that successfully won the hearts of Internet users at the beginning of the 2000s are now actively used in hypercasual projects. Also the “expectation formulas” that calculate the construction time of buildings, the growth of crops and other long-term actions have not changed much and have migrated from the “browser”.

Advertising strategies, fundamental mechanisms, ways of holding the player, checking the success of the chosen concept – an “updated” Flash development base is visible in all this.

Many tricks were discovered 20 years ago and now, with the growing popularity of mobile gaming, they simply adapt to new technologies and opportunities.

Flash is a thing of the past, where the grass is greener and games more interesting. Projects based on it can still be accessed with special programs such as FlashPoint.

But it was replaced by HTML5, Unity and WebGL – new technologies that allow you to prototype a game in almost any genre in a few evenings. In terms of complexity, they are not much different from Flash, and in terms of capabilities they surpass it many times over.

With the emergence of courses and intensive courses, including free ones, anyone who knows which side to hold the mouse on can learn how to make games. And with due diligence, everything is also in order with earnings – major market players such as Yandex or VKontakte are actively developing their sites where you can publish your project and earn income from it.

Flash is gone. An entire era has passed with him. This technology has changed the face of the modern gaming industry and has brought the world many talented developers and interesting projects.

What do you think of Flash? Which games do you remember the most? And are you playing browser projects now?