A Fond Farewell to Flash

Since Flash has less than a year left, I decided I should make a post about this platform that has long been very dear to me. Flash has always represented something special in that it allows very small teams or even individuals to create glorious animations and fun games that would perhaps have required whole development studios to make had Flash not existed. This lends itself very well to the world of indie gaming, which I love because small-scale projects are able to take risks that mainstream products can't afford to. When big games by big studios can start to feel stale and predictable, indie games can offer a good alternative because they feel fresh and inspired. And Flash allows these games to be hosted in a browser so you don't even have to download them, so the lack of time investment gives no reason not to try out lots of first-time games by unknown hobbyists or rising-star developers. There's no risk and nothing to lose because if you don't like a game you can happily try some other ones.

Going back to the early days, when Tom Fulp created Newgrounds in the late 90's he really got the Flash ball rolling. Homestar Runner was also really great, and it's an example of a whole website built out of Flash, full of games and movies and just fun interactive stuff. Eventually the world of Flash gaming became an established part of the Internet. I would like to revisit some of my favorite or most memorable Flash games from over the years and say a little bit about them, so you can go ahead and try them out yourself if you like.

I'd like to start with the games of my friend John Cooney who is perhaps one of the most prolific game developers of all time with over 100 games under his belt. I was first introduced to John when I discovered Ball Revamped 2 (probably on addictinggames.com) and I was hooked. The Ball Revamped series is fast-paced, has a distinctive atmosphere, and is objectively way better than more modern equivalents like Flappy Bird.

More than just with making games, I often (wrongly) credit John with inventing entire game genres. Though Kitten Cannon was released several years earlier, when Hedgehog Launch "took off" many other launch games followed in its wake. :P

I sometimes even say John Cooney invented achievements (even though that may not be technically true) because I remember playing TBA++ and being thrown for a loop. In addition to the cannon-to-cannon mechanic from the first TBA, this sequel had little named awards you could get for doing things that weren't directly related to beating the game. I had never seen this game mechanic before and I thought it was really cool. Of course the trend caught on and then the Xbox 360 and other gaming platforms actually built achievements into their systems and the rest is history.

I often say the Dark Cut series is my favorite of John's work. Even though the games might be considered simplistic since they're just surgery games where you have to follow instructions within a time limit without making too many mistakes, at the time they pushed the boundaries of Flash games. I think Dark Cut expanded my idea of what Flash games could be about and this made it seem like anything was possible. Surgery games are somewhat common nowadays, and on a side note Amateur Surgeon by Adult Swim Games is one of my favorite Flash games of all time.

I have to mention the Four Second series. Perhaps inspired by Nintendo's WarioWare series, Four Second Fury was just a small collection of microgames. Then Four Second Frenzy introduced the idea of mixing together microgames created by different developers. Then finally I myself lent my talents to Four Second Firestorm as one of the many developers involved, and I cited my contribution for a long time when talking to potential employers about my experience. Years later I tried to gather game developers together for my own project, and while I didn't attract many devs I'm still very proud of that collaboration.

Armor Games was perhaps the best place to play Flash games since they had such high standards of quality, and I'm glad to see that the website is still hosting browser games despite (most of) the games not being made with Flash anymore. Since John spent years at Armor Games, I'd like to mention some of the other devs who worked with Armor. Jakrin "Krin" Juangbhanich is best known for the Sonny series which brought role playing games to the world of Flash gaming using his own innovative game design that made the RPG feel very fresh.

Antony "The-EXP" Lavelle is the incredible creator of games like the IndestructoTank series, which is a partial inspiration for my unfinished game Jugglenaut. I'm also a big fan of his SHIFT series of puzzle games which really illustrate the value of good level design.

Danny "CoolioNiato" Yaroslavski is another friend of mine, and his puzzle game Light-Bot can actually teach people programming skills. I believe it may be inspired by the Motor Programming section of The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain, and it is itself a predecessor to Danny's SpriteBox games which aim to teach coding skills to very young children. Danny was pretty young himself when his games became popular, so I see him as a sort of prodigy.

Joey Betz also made great games for Armor, such as the Pachinko-inspired Sushi Cat. I had the pleasure of meeting him at a Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco, and I got to ask him about how he was able to implement Sushi Cat's amazing jelly physics.

I got to meet Chris "Con Artist" Condon as well, who is known for some very popular games like the Crush the Castle series (which was programmed by Joey Betz). While the game idea was itself borrowed from a game called Castle Clout (with permission), it's sometimes said to have been stolen by the billion-dollar franchise Angry Birds (without permission). Like how books can be used to cheaply test the waters to estimate whether a movie will make money, sometimes Flash games have similarly been used as tests to see what trends large game companies can make popular.

Sushi Cat and Crush the Castle used an engine called Box2D which has enabled many indie developers to implement glorious physics in their games. Physics-based puzzle games became a well-established genre in the Flash world, with many great examples like Magic Pen. This game allows you to bring shapes to life by drawing anything you want and having it magically appear as a physical object in the game world.

There has been a long tradition of bridge-building architectural simulators being used as games in addition to their practical uses. The game Cargo Bridge may not be something people should model real-life bridges after, but its fun bouncy gameplay still manages to convey a sense of how bridge physics works.

I definitely want to mention Inca Blocks since it is one of the many hidden gems of the Flash world, meaning it's far less popular than it deserves to be. Gravity gimmicks aren't uncommon in Flash games, but what's unique about Inca Blocks is that every object in the game has a different gravity vector applied to it simultaneously! Be warned: this game takes a lot of patience.

The developers LongAnimals and robotJAM combined to form the team Turbo Nuke, and that name was like a stamp of quality. While their games span a range of genres, they always seemed to have a thing for racing games like the physics-based Cyclomaniacs. I particularly like the bizarre Rocket Panda which may have been inspired by Star Fox.

Edmund McMillen is perhaps the most famous indie game developer of all time, and before his career really took off I enjoyed playing his Flash games like Spewer. This game features some seriously impressive liquid physics, and there are even different types of liquid that behave differently based on viscosity, etc. I've often placed it in my top three favorite Flash games.

While Flash games once stuck to genres that lent themselves to small and short "bite-sized" games, as the world of Flash gaming matured I started seeing bigger and more ambitious ones being released. Barbarium is an example of an adventure platformer, commonly referred to as the Metroidvania genre because of the Metroid and Castlevania franchises. These non-linear games involve exploration and backtracking as you gain new abilities, so they're hardly "coffee break" games for casual gamers.

While adventure platformers may take on grandiose proportions, they sometimes feature very small heroes. Snailiad is a charming game of incredible quality, and yet it seems to be this developer's first and only game. I'm certainly impressed and glad they decided to dip their toes into Flash game development.

I don't want to throw around the word "epic" too much, but Phoenotopia is a game of truly epic proportions (by Flash game standards anyway). It seems the developers were inspired by console games like The Legend of Zelda, and they wanted to make a side-scrolling version of the classic action adventure genre. It's like Zelda 2 but prettier and more fun.

Wilt: The Last Blossom is also pretty in its own way, but it's set in a rotten post-apocalyptic world where all plant life has nearly gone extinct. This game is not only masterful in its game design, but also in its soundtrack and the poetic nature of its story.

Redder is special among adventure platformers in that you don't accumulate new abilities as you play. This game has its own ways of making you explore the whole map in order to eventually reach the game's mind-boggling conclusion, a conclusion that perhaps invokes sci-fi classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Since all the adventure platformers I selected just happened to have "pixel graphics" (the old-school low-resolution enlarged-pixel aesthetic meant to resemble classic game consoles or DOS games), you may be noticing that pixel graphics are not uncommon in the Flash world despite Flash's original purpose being to facilitate vector graphics. Clarence's Big Chance is another great example of an excellent pixel game, and the creator Pseudolonewolf is also known for bringing classic JRPG's to the Flash world with MARDEK.

When I try to think of my all-time favorite Flash games, I usually put Dino Run at the top of the list. It is fast-paced, doesn't take long to play, has exploration/collection mechanics and beautiful pixel graphics, and is just generally a fun and fine-tuned experience. While there's not much time to explore while running for your life, that's okay because the world is procedurally-generated to keep you coming back for more. Pixel Jam is also known for other immensely high-quality games like Gamma Bros (featuring lyrics that are still stuck in my head).

Nitrome is so good at making high-quality pixel games that they're sometimes referred to as pixel wizards. Rather than sticking to familiar designs like some developers do, Nitrome always pushed its limits through innovative experimentation. Final Ninja wowed Flash gamers with its ninja star grappling hook mechanics, and Mega Mash stitched multiple games together in such a way that you can move a Tetris piece off the edge of its map and have it hop into another game world. My personal favorite Nitrome game is the physics-based puzzler Icebreaker.

If you like super-difficult platformers where you have to die thousands of times in order to beat the game, you will probably like MoneySeize. Unrelated to the actual gameplay, you may notice in this game something I call "pseudopixels." That's when developers want the best of both worlds by combining pixel graphics with transformations like scaling and rotation that are normally only suited for vector graphics. I call it pseudopixels because it's trying to mimic the aesthetic of an "8-bit" game system while featuring graphics that such a system couldn't actually render.

The pixel graphics of Guardian Rock are different in that the pixels aren't enlarged, but it still has a classic look and feel to it. Also the game is a lot of fun and it's a favorite of my dear older brother. The goal is simple: find a way to crush all the human invaders.

If there's one genre that thrived in the Flash world more than any other, it might be point-and-click adventures. I love the point-and-click genre because it has a way of staying unpredictable when other genres start to feel repetitive. My friend Sarah "TinyStuffz" Duffield-Harding was inspired by her favorite LucasArts point-and-clicks like The Curse of Monkey Island, so she eventually crowdfunded the pixel game Theropods after releasing a Flash version on Newgrounds.

Gretel and Hansel is a Flash game with graphics made entirely with watercolor. There are supposed to be three games in the series and only two have been released at the time of this writing, with faithful fans being left in limbo forever. This is a feeling that may be familiar from many unfinished games series, Flash or otherwise. I still must recommend these creative games that I would describe as dark, disturbing, macabre, psychedelic, and certainly grim!

Another example of a twisted fairytale Flash game is Hood by Hyptosis, where you play as the Big Bad Wolf. I typically describe Hyptosis as a master storyteller, with some of his games being so story-heavy they could be considered more like visual novels. Alice is Dead may be what he's most famous for, a twisted fairytale where you play as the White Rabbit. On a side note, I feel like twisted fairytales are so ubiquitous that they're more common than non-twisted fairytales.

Mateusz Skutnik has created many "first-person" point-and-click adventures, which are easier to make than third-person games because you don't have to animate a character walking around. One of his greatest accomplishments is the eerie Submachine series, which has many installments that build a rich and bizarre world. One of the common themes between the games in the series is that you hop between parallel dimensions, with all of them being unsettling in some way or other.

Speaking of unsettling, the world of Rusty Lake may have Submachine beat when it comes to point-and-click horror. But rather than just trying to scare you, these "Cube Escape" games tend to have the effect of warping your mind. I am such a fan of these games that I make sure I play all of them, even the ones that I have to pay for. While the unique storytelling style of these games allows you to play them in any order, I tend to recommend playing the original Samsara Room first just so that it will blow your mind as much as possible, and I think it's only available as a Flash game.

Speaking of mind bending, many of my favorite games could be described as tile-based puzzle games. These games are often perfect examples of the importance of good level design, a sometimes-overlooked component of game design. The mind-bending game Paul & Percy is not nearly as popular as it deserves to be, with brilliant level design to go with the brilliant game mechanics. Apparently players were too disoriented by the sideways reflective world (perhaps bringing the upside down from Stranger Things to mind). I like this game so much that I got better scores in some levels than the builtin maximum scores, and the developers were so impressed that they wanted me to help test their iPad release.

Whether or not Sideomorph would be considered a tile-based puzzle game, it's certainly reality-bending. This side-scrolling puzzle game is played on the sides of a cube, which allows you to scroll in ways you never thought possible. You can walk to the cube faces to the left or the right, or you can rotate the face you're in so that the top and bottom of the cube become your new left and right. Mechanics involving 2D gameplay projected onto a 3D world can also be seen in the eye-popping Sky Island.

Speaking of unpopular games, Frost is truly exceptional despite being nearly unknown. I remember being so stumped by some of these puzzles that I was at one point convinced that the game wasn't tested to make sure it was beatable, but in truth it just involves expanding your mind a bit.

Talesworth Adventure may seem simple, but its sheer quality has never allowed me to forget it. I'm amazed by how much they were able to do with so little, meaning each puzzle feels so fresh and unique even though they all mostly use the same straightforward mechanics. Some levels do actually have unique elements in them, and that makes it all even better. The creator was apparently inspired by their love of tile-based D&D dungeon maps.

Without Flash I never would my discovered my favorite game franchise: Deadly Rooms of Death. I have Maurycy Zarzycki to thank for bringing to the Flash world the first game in the series: King Dugan's Dungeon. The game apparently has 25 levels and Maurycy was releasing 4-level chunks as episodes, and I believe I first came across DROD when I saw episode 3 pop up on Newgrounds. I didn't know what to think of it at first but I quickly fell in love with DROD because it has the kind of adult-level puzzles I crave while staying fun and adventurous rather than getting tedious. The final episode will probably never be released in light of Flash's demise, but being the DROD fan that I am I'll be happy to replay the levels I've already played when I get around to playing the full desktop version of King Dugan's Dungeon. I've already beaten most of the other games of course.

Like the rest of indie gaming, the Flash world involves what are known as "art games." While all games have art in them such as the graphics and the music, art games are special in that the games themselves strive to exist for some artistic purpose. The imaginative Gregory Weir created lots of them, like (I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors about an enormous tentacled monster from the colorless deep. When the movie How to Train Your Dragon came out I remembered Gregory's How to Raise a Dragon from years earlier and thought there might be a connection, though the book How to Train Your Dragon predates Gregory's game.

Despite being a short game, a lot of players seemed to complain about 400 Years taking too long (which is ironic considering the title). This game's unique design involves waiting for years at a time for trees and stalactites and even civilizations to grow. Perhaps more than the game itself, I remember reading a particularly funny comment that went something like this: "People are complaining that you can't move fast. You're a rock with a 400-year deadline. You don't have to move fast." It's the "you're a rock" part that gets me.

Raitendo is known both for the weirdly-catchy game Doeo and for You Only Live Once (which predates the YOLO trend that is itself now outdated). To me the best examples of video games as art always subvert some kind of established gaming tradition, and the idea behind You Only Live Once is to subvert your expectation of being able to die many times and retry the game over and over. The game uses some kind of persistent storage that remembers your death and prevents you from starting over no matter how many times you refresh the page. I did actually manage to beat the game using a hack that let me try again, but I won't reveal it here. Let's just say it involved finding the right website where the game was hosted.

As I Lay Dying! is a morbidly poetic autobiographical-but-not-really puzzle platformer. You play as the girlfriend of the game's deceased developer and you have to carry his heavy corpse out of the woods so that it doesn't get eaten by birds. I'm not kidding.

Where We Remain is game with many mysteries that are open for interpretation. You are stranded on a haunted island with a rich history for you to piece together. I've sometimes thought this game would make a good movie, or at least a good fake movie trailer.

I almost forgot to mention the iconically stylized games of Bart Bonte, but I was reminded when I signed into Armor Games and saw that he has just released an enhanced version of his classic puzzle game Factory Balls. I played through his whole demo and then bought the game for Android as a way of paying respect. His games are minimalistic and streamlined with fresh and delightful puzzle elements, and they're perfectly accessible to casual gamers as well.

I was once asked to recommend games that would make a good distraction, and I said "anything by Molkman." His games like Lucky Tower are as funny as they are fun, full of weird animations and dialogue. Molkman is truly a Flash legend in my mind.

Wanting to talk about the forgotten game Ge.Ne.Sis was surely a major motivator for this post. Ge.Ne.Sis is a unique tactical RPG with a deeply fleshed-out story. All of the art in the game clearly had a lot of love put into it and one of the features that stuck out to me was that the soundtrack is comprised of full-length songs, some of them upwards of five minutes. It's normal for a track in a Flash game to be a 30-second loop with some variation depending on how much time the player is expected to spend in the part of the game where the song is playing, so a main gameplay track will be longer than a menu track. But in Ge.Ne.Sis you can just sit there and wait and the music will keep changing and flowing into new themes without repeating itself for a long time.

GemCraft is certainly not a forgotten game but the first chapter is titled "The Forgotten." Since you can combine gems to blend their colors and powers together, I commented that something special should happen if you combine all eight colors into one gem. I don't know if the developer heard me or not, but the next game contained a special prismatic gem that you make by combining the others like I described. So there were eight colors plus a ninth combined color, much like the borders I've applied to the boxes on this page. I probably don't need to explain how much the tower defense genre thrived in the Flash world. Other tower defense games I like include the genre-redefining Kingdom Rush, and when it won all the awards at the Flash Gaming Summit I was there to see the developers nervously say they were each worse at speaking English than the previous one even though they spoke English fine and it was cute. I also like Protector: Reclaiming the Throne because the levels are so finely tuned that it's like a puzzle game where you have to figure out each special solution.

I'm happy to pick Blue Rabbit's Climate Chaos by The Super Flash Bros. as the final game for my list because it's another one of my all-time favorite Flash games. This game is a marvel for many reasons, like bringing 3D gameplay to the Flash world in a time when no one else was. One of the game's defining qualities is that it uses its own language to communicate with the player. The characters talk in gibberish and symbols so that the point can get across regardless of whatever languages that the player happens to speak. When I looked up this game to link to it for this post, I came across a recent comment from someone who said they remembered playing the game as a child because it was one of the few games available to them as someone who couldn't read English at the time, and that warmed my heart.

Thank you for reading my post! I felt the need to write this because of how much Flash games still mean to me. If you feel like there are specific games that should be on this list then I'd probably agree with you. The games I picked and the people I chose are largely arbitrary, but I felt that I had to make arbitrary decisions about what to include or else this post would never get written and then it would be too late before I knew it. I picked the games I picked and I credited the people I credited because they mean something special to me or because I want more people to know about them or because they do a good job of showcasing the world of Flash gaming.

I recall occasions when people like me would express concern that Flash was going to die soon, and there would be snarky responses about how we could always use some kind of emulator if we really wanted to play Bloons. I have nothing against Bloons of course, but in this case it was being used to diminish the rich world of Flash gaming. So part of my motivation for making this post was to prove to the ignorant just how much value is being lost because of the decision to discontinue Flash support. It's not just a few frivolous lightweight coffee-break games for kids, it's a whole ecosystem built by many of the most creative people in the world.

If you'd like another sort of postmortem of Flash games, John Cooney actually did an hour-long talk about this at GDC back in 2017. Thank you again, and may Flash live on in our hearts forever <3

~ Kyle Delaney