How Flashpoint Wants To Preserve Flash Games When The Web Abandons Them

BlueMaxima's Flashpoint wants to preserve Flash

Apple hates it, Google hates it, and so does almost everyone else, including Adobe its creator. But Flash is still in many people's hearts.

With the many Flash games out there on the web, having less and less support would leave many Flash games as stray apps.

Many people still play them, and this is why a website called 'Flashpoint' wants to save the games, allowing Flash lovers to also play them offline.

Run by BlueMaxima, the site wants to be like the Internet Archive, but instead for the World Wide Web, it wants to be the "webgame preservation project" that preserves old Flash games people played, and still play.

According to the Flashpoint website:

"Internet history is important, and content made on platforms such as Adobe Flash are a significant portion of that culture doomed to obscurity. This project is dedicated to preserving as many games and animations from these platforms as possible, so that they aren't lost to time."

To make this happen, the site uses "a strong selection of open-source software, in an easy-to-use launcher." Its Redirector for example, "does a massive amount of service by making web content pretend it's on the internet."

Flashpoint main offerings include:

  1. Infinity: Allows users to download games as they play them, using the Flashpoint launcher. The package is smaller, and doesn't list every game initially.
  2. Ultimate: The full package that delivers the entire Flashpoint library of games, which accounts to hundreds of gigabytes.

Flashpoint supports and preserves games and animations that were created using Adobe Flash, Adobe Shockwave, HTML5, Java Applets, Unity Web Player, Microsoft's Silverlight, 3DVIA Player, 3D Groove GX, PopCap Plugin, ActiveX, Authorware Web Player, GoBit Games Plugin and Shiva3D.

Using the Flashpoint launcher, users can download games as they play them
Using the Flashpoint launcher, users can download games as they play them. (Credit: BlueMaxima)

It was back in July 2017 that Adobe announced it would end support for Flash Player at the end of 2020.

Since then, the creator and the supporter of Flash started encouraging the use of HTML5 in place of Flash.

As the standard of the web, HTML5 is a software solution stack agreed to define the properties and behaviors of web page content by implementing a markup-based pattern to it. While some features of HTML5 are often compared to Adobe Flash, the two have different technologies.

For example, both can be used for playing audio and video within web pages. But the main difference is that HTML5 on its own cannot be used for animation or interactivity, as it must be supplemented with CSS3 or JavaScript.

HTML5 is the fifth major version of HTML that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation.

With HTML5 replacing Flash's position, its death is slow and inevitable.

But since Flash games are still in many people's hearts, and not to mention how much the developers spent their time and money to create the games, BlueMaxima wants to preserve them all, despite the web isn't wanting the format anymore.

While there are indeed a lot of interesting Flash games, not every one of them is interesting or worth to fight for. But still, in terms of how Flash has helped shape the World Wide Web, Flash games no matter how good or bad, are still worth preserving. Blue Maxima said that it would remove any games at their developers' request.

According to the website, since Flashpoint 7.0 "Eight Thousand Hours", Flashpoint hosts more than 36,000 games (and 2,300 animations).

Published: 
05/02/2020