Gone in a Flash: Musings on Digital Impermanence

“Since Adobe will no longer be supporting Flash Player after December 31, 2020 and Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021, Adobe strongly recommends all users immediately uninstall Flash Player to help protect their systems.” There is a generation of gamers who honed their skills on internet browsers. Many kids with mice and keyboards flocked to their preferred domain. Perhaps you were a frequenter of Addicting Games, Armor Games, or Newgrounds.

I, myself, spent most of my time on OneMoreLevel, always telling myself that I’d only needed to play well “one more level.” There were platforms and RPGs, sports sims and visual novels. There were licensed properties and original ideas and clones of those original ideas that were circulated in an attempt to capture those coveted clicks. There were empires founded on this bit of software and we are starting 2021 by watching them fall.

Of course some of the more popular games have been archived so to speak. Some have found homes in proper releases on Steam such as the zombie scif-fi RPG, Sonny.

Others have migrated over to consoles as is the case with N: The Way of the Ninja and The Fancy Pants Adventures. Some you can still download like Need from Madness and Radical Aces (although, those aren’t true Flash Games, instead being created with the 3dvia player, but their software is similarly dated). Concerted efforts from BlueMaxima saved more than 38,000 flash games before the sof…