The Death Of Flash: An Early Internet Flashback

14 hours ago3 min read

By Amie Ahn Feb. 12, 2025

The room is enveloped in a soothing silence as students click and clack on their keyboards. The colorful screens of bulky desktop monitors light up the space, and each screen displays a different game—Alien Hominid, Run 2 and Club Penguin. Many recall this unforgettable time of day of their childhood—computer class—as what they eagerly looked forward to everyday in elementary school. In the 2000s, browser games, developed using Adobe Flash, peaked in popularity because of their casual gameplay and accessibility before being dethroned by modern digitally downloaded games and mobile games.

Originally, a web browser was mostly text and image based. The plug-in software Adobe Flash Player became the most popular way to host multimedia content such as videos and interactive content on browsers, leading to its frequent usage in browser games. Before browser games, game software was accessed through physical mediums, such as floppy disks and CDs. Created in 1996, Adobe Flash popularized casual gaming by providing a free and convenient way to play these games, simply by playing on a window on a webpage. Newgrounds, originally an entertainment website based on user-generated content, became the first Flash-centered website in 1999 with the release of the Flash game “Pico’s School”.

However, as the platform aged, Flash’s security issues and inefficient code increased concern. In 2010, Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, banned Adobe Flash Player from Apple mobile devices, noting the lack of stability, security and its high usage of battery power in his public letter “Thoughts on Flash.” While stopping support of a proprietary solution like Flash, Jobs promoted the open standard Hypertext Markup Language 5 (HTML5). HTML5, a more modern multimedia platform, beat Flash in performance and stability. Soon, HTML5 emerged as the main platform for new browser games, and eventually, Adobe ended support for Flash in 2020, rendering everything developed with it unusable.

By the time HTML5 was widely being used across many platforms for various web applications, smartphones came to be used by nearly everyone, including students and casual gamers. The advanced graphic capability and processing power of such smartphones were tremendously improved over older cell phones, making it an ideal platform for new games. Subsequently, games downloaded onto phones largely supplanted browser games as a form of casual fun.

“I prefer mobile games over browser games because of their better graphics and ease of access, including when one is offline. However, browser games are widely played in elementary schools because they are more convenient for younger kids without mobile devices, ” Sophomore Krishay Madhav said.

Despite being overshadowed by more advanced technologies, Flash games are still valued by many individuals. Shortly after Adobe announced ending support for Flash in 2017, fans created Flashpoint Archive, an archive dedicated to preserving browser games and making them playable even with the discontinuation of Flash Player. Although countless projects have become lost media, through this project, over 200,000 games and animations have been preserved and remain playable. Additionally, upon Flash's termination in 2020, Flash games were preserved often by converting them to HTML5.

“I enjoy the variety of games available on browser game sites and also being able to discover new games on them. Additionally, I have a lot of nostalgic memories of playing online browser games since elementary school that keeps me playing them in high school,” Freshman Kameron Distinti said.

Constantly evolving technology continues to improve gaming platforms, while the era of browser games continues to fade. Nonetheless, Flash was one of the earliest sources of independent gaming content that marked a significant advancement for web browsers, pioneering modern casual gaming culture.

About the Contributors

Amie Ahn is a sophomore at Leland High School and a writer for the Charger Account. In her free time, she enjoys listening to music, hanging out with friends and eating.