Perhaps worse than the death of Flash was the death of Shockwave. I feel like so many Shockwave games I played back in the day are completely gone with no reference to them on the modern internet. Today, you can install some version of Flash on most operating systems, but I don't think there's any modern standalone Shockwave player and I could only get the plugin to work in Safari on macOS. Chrome and Firefox don't even run those types of plugins anymore.
There's one particular Shockwave game that I was recently able to recover from the depths of the Wayback Machine, which was a game from Disney for the Inspector Gadget movie; terrible film, but their website had this nifty little game that wasn't necessarily difficult but was addicting in that I wanted to see just how far I could go with it. For years I thought it was gone for good, and was glad to finally see it again after I lost it 15+ years ago.
I always liked it in part because I don't think I've seen a similar game. It's kind of like if you took the random shapes part of Tetris and added a "jigsaw puzzle" element.
https://get.adobe.com/shockwave/ is allegedly still a thing that exists and that you can install if you have Windows. It says it works on Windows 7 and 8, IE, and Firefox. My guess is that they haven't updated that, and it'll no longer work on Firefox since Quantum, but it's likely some flavor of IE will work with you there. And my guess is it'll work on Windows 10 with IE, since most things that work on 8 work fine on 10.
It's a damn shame that HTML5 implementations of Flash, like Shumway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software)) and Swiffy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Swiffy) are no longer being actively developed. I would have thought running SWFs in the JS sandbox would be a good way to get the compatibility of Flash, without the insane security bugs that it comes with.
And in case anyone is still in doubt about Flash's security woes - take a gander at the Flash CVE page at https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p.... There were FIVE CVSS 10 bugs (total and complete remote code execution with minimal user interaction, i.e. visit a malicious page and your computer is owned) published just two months ago. The author of Flashpoint is absolutely correct in his assessment that Flash will be overrun with security bugs as soon as it hits EOL in 2020.
> I would have thought running SWFs in the JS sandbox would be a good way to get the compatibility of Flash
And these days a WebAssembly build of Flash player would be an even better way, but it would depend on Adobe being willing to spend the time and the money to do it.
Yes, we're in a different situation than people who preserve old console or PC games because those have a platform that is pretty much known and extensively documented. Even if you can't run the hardware anymore there are emulators that work great. It's harder on closed platforms like Nintendo.
With Flash, I don't know that we'll ever have an open source desktop player to allow preserving these games and allowing them to play on all future platforms. You might as well ask someone to write a complete implementation of Java, with no access to the source code, for free. Eventually we'll probably be stuck with old virtualized editions of windows running old versions of Flash. Let alone the possibility of leaving x86 behind completely.
I do understand some of the reasons behind the web community’s rejection of flash over the past decade and a half — security and accessibility issues, closed standards, etc. However Flash and Shockwawe technology enabled smooth interactive graphics on 90’s and 00’s desktop hardware, in packages that are friendly for 56kbps dialup connections. Nothing compares to it, still to this day — web platform tech still horribly underperforms and is only now capable of what flash could do a decade ago. We could also blame Apple and Smartphones and Yourube for its demise, but I feel like we haven’t moved forward in terms of quality shareable interactive media since Flash.
I also grew up spending a lot of time playing those games.
I say good ridance to the flash video players, but seeing the screenshots of those games, it makes me pretty sad to think that so many of them might be going away.
And open platforms, if browser vendors decide to break your content. Hard to say at this point whether HTML5 games will end up lasting any longer than Flash games did. Openness is valuable but you also just have to look at whether the platform owner(s) are going to stick around (Google isn't going anywhere, at least) and whether they have a long-term commitment to the products and APIs they put out there. HTML5 is starting to look like a churn nightmare between arbitrary changes to audio policy and major features getting shut off due to threats like Spectre.
Adobe was a very bad platform steward regardless, but 5 years from now it may turn out that Win32 was a better choice in terms of developer investment/maintenance than HTML5 for many developers. iOS has had an incredible upkeep cost for indie game developers who released products on it early on, and we've seen many developers opt to pull games from the store instead of spend time+money updating them.
Hopefully WebAssembly helps fix things here by providing a much cleaner compile target (with well-defined APIs) that has good performance. Moving to HTML5 had a major performance hit for people previously using Flash or Unity's plugin but most of that hit is gone once you use wasm.
This was the only good option at the time. One alternative was for people to pass .exe files around. That was a great way to spread viruses. Another alternative was Java applets which was a great way to lock up a browser. JavaScript didn't do shit in the the Netscape and IE 4/5 days. So was everyone supposed to make Windows games or just give up? Would that have been better?
Let this be a warning to young developers tying into browser platforms.
For all the openness of web standards, let's remember that browsers are proprietary.
If a browser vendor decide to do something (whatever it is, good or bad), there is pretty much nothing users or developers can do, we saw it with IE6 for a long time, we now see it with Google Chrome too.
AFAIK browser plugins were considered part of those web standards (see [0] and [1])
- Load the game into a real web browser and let it run for a bit
- Intercept all network requests with a caching proxy
- Save the external resources loaded to disk
Would that help? The process could be automated, though only for games which load all their resources without human interaction. But then, clicking through a few screens to get a game to start is a much less time- and knowledge-intensive task per game than reverse-engineering the source code of each, at least to get as much data backed up in some state as possible before it disappears.
While you need to play through the entire game to be sure you have all of it, this is a big time save, though with the downside it doesn't work over HTTPS. It's also possible to use a Fiddler script to accomplish something similar, which defeats the HTTPS problem.
I like this idea, but (and I know barely anything about games) then I wonder that maybe the resources for lets say the final level of a game are not included, if you let it idle only on the first level, no?
There’s eventually going to be one question on the lips of everyone involved, though: is this legal? And the only real answer is nobody knows and really, nobody should care.
I can understand having an urge to preserve something that is in danger of decaying past recovery — I feel the same way when I see an interesting building or a classic airplane rotting away somewhere — but the usual course of action is to choose what you find most worth saving, purchase it from the owner, and restore your new possession. Any other course isn't legal, in most cases, and it isn't here either, in most cases. I care about that, and some of the game creators will care about it too.
Here's the thing. A lot of the games being saved here are games that the original publishers/developers no longer care about - that or the original creators don't even exist anymore. That throws a large portion of Flash games into the gray area of abandonware, although that's a different discussion entirely.
This is actually a place where I differ with BlueMaxima (BlueMaxima is Flashpoint's creator and the writer of the article linked here.) Personally, if I were running the project I would remove a game if the original creator asked, simply out of respect for them.
However, I think that most of the staff involved with Flashpoint would disagree with me here. It is more of a "for now, just go go go and we'll worry about organizing everything and dealing with the repercussions later." There's a lot of Flash games out there to say the least and Flash being discontinued in 2020 leaves us limited time if we hope to save as much as possible.
Say you somehow have advance knowledge of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Is it legal to steal as many books as you can from the Library prior? Of course not. Is this the only way to save unique volumes from irrevocable destruction when you have no way to convince the librarians of its imminent fate, or even to contact them at all? Yes.
I think when it comes down to a conflict between an individual's property rights, and the entirety of future human culture having access to a work to learn from and build upon; I say fuck your individual property rights.
Especially in situations where a work is entirely digital, and preserving the work does absolutely no harm to the owner of said work.
And this is the problem I have with tying anything to a remote server. Every digital movie, song, book, or video game that requires a remote server for patches, activation, or anything else will eventually end up like this.
What happens in 5 years when Sony turns off their PS3 servers? And what happens in 10 years when most of the hard drives in those PS3s need replacing?
Not only this, but I've had a very difficult time even finding original SWFs of animutations. Albinoblacksheep only seems to host video renders these days. While that works, many authors hid extra content in their videos, and that's now lost to time.
It's about saving cultural goods. The worst thing about the modern age is how transient and impermanent data is. In 100 years, the past 30 years will be effectively a big black hole for anybody interested in studying our culture and civilization.
[+] [-] ravenstine|7 years ago|reply
There's one particular Shockwave game that I was recently able to recover from the depths of the Wayback Machine, which was a game from Disney for the Inspector Gadget movie; terrible film, but their website had this nifty little game that wasn't necessarily difficult but was addicting in that I wanted to see just how far I could go with it. For years I thought it was gone for good, and was glad to finally see it again after I lost it 15+ years ago.
Here it is in all its 1999 glory: https://web.archive.org/web/20031017000018/http://www.disney...
I always liked it in part because I don't think I've seen a similar game. It's kind of like if you took the random shapes part of Tetris and added a "jigsaw puzzle" element.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz|7 years ago|reply
No clue how to find that link on official adobe.com website :/ I had to googlefu it just so my Mum can play some old majong games.
[+] [-] mehrdadn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Laforet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] modzu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nneonneo|7 years ago|reply
And in case anyone is still in doubt about Flash's security woes - take a gander at the Flash CVE page at https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p.... There were FIVE CVSS 10 bugs (total and complete remote code execution with minimal user interaction, i.e. visit a malicious page and your computer is owned) published just two months ago. The author of Flashpoint is absolutely correct in his assessment that Flash will be overrun with security bugs as soon as it hits EOL in 2020.
[+] [-] clouddrover|7 years ago|reply
And these days a WebAssembly build of Flash player would be an even better way, but it would depend on Adobe being willing to spend the time and the money to do it.
[+] [-] myfonj|7 years ago|reply
http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/examples/racing/ (via aforementioned https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/ )
http://gordonjs.s3.amazonaws.com/trip.html (via https://github.com/tobytailor/gordon/wiki )
https://google-developers.appspot.com/swiffy/showcase/snake_... (not reading SWF directly but running converted script; via https://developers.google.com/swiffy/showcase/ )
[+] [-] bscphil|7 years ago|reply
With Flash, I don't know that we'll ever have an open source desktop player to allow preserving these games and allowing them to play on all future platforms. You might as well ask someone to write a complete implementation of Java, with no access to the source code, for free. Eventually we'll probably be stuck with old virtualized editions of windows running old versions of Flash. Let alone the possibility of leaving x86 behind completely.
[+] [-] lxe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdonaldson|7 years ago|reply
https://haxe.org/
http://www.openfl.org/
Case Studies:
https://haxe.org/blog/tivo-using-haxe-to-improve-user-experi...
https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/12/flowplay-overhauls-vegas-...
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bdz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anchpop|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simongr3dal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krupan|7 years ago|reply
(Not one mention in TFA of http://homestarrunner.com, for shame)
[+] [-] wvenable|7 years ago|reply
You could avoid being tied to proprietary platforms now but there is a good chance you're just leaving the market to someone else.
[+] [-] kevingadd|7 years ago|reply
Adobe was a very bad platform steward regardless, but 5 years from now it may turn out that Win32 was a better choice in terms of developer investment/maintenance than HTML5 for many developers. iOS has had an incredible upkeep cost for indie game developers who released products on it early on, and we've seen many developers opt to pull games from the store instead of spend time+money updating them.
Hopefully WebAssembly helps fix things here by providing a much cleaner compile target (with well-defined APIs) that has good performance. Moving to HTML5 had a major performance hit for people previously using Flash or Unity's plugin but most of that hit is gone once you use wasm.
[+] [-] rbosinger|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwetan|7 years ago|reply
For all the openness of web standards, let's remember that browsers are proprietary.
If a browser vendor decide to do something (whatever it is, good or bad), there is pretty much nothing users or developers can do, we saw it with IE6 for a long time, we now see it with Google Chrome too.
AFAIK browser plugins were considered part of those web standards (see [0] and [1])
[0]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/infrastructure.html#p...
[1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/system-state.html#plu...
[+] [-] qiushihe|7 years ago|reply
... as in Windows, MacOS (to a much less extend), PlayStation, XBox, Switch (and/or other Nintendo platform)?
This warning makes no sense.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] exgamedev|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mintplant|7 years ago|reply
- Load the game into a real web browser and let it run for a bit
- Intercept all network requests with a caching proxy
- Save the external resources loaded to disk
Would that help? The process could be automated, though only for games which load all their resources without human interaction. But then, clicking through a few screens to get a game to start is a much less time- and knowledge-intensive task per game than reverse-engineering the source code of each, at least to get as much data backed up in some state as possible before it disappears.
[+] [-] tomysshadow|7 years ago|reply
https://www.cockos.com/assniffer/
While you need to play through the entire game to be sure you have all of it, this is a big time save, though with the downside it doesn't work over HTTPS. It's also possible to use a Fiddler script to accomplish something similar, which defeats the HTTPS problem.
[+] [-] snowpanda|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JasonFruit|7 years ago|reply
There’s eventually going to be one question on the lips of everyone involved, though: is this legal? And the only real answer is nobody knows and really, nobody should care.
I can understand having an urge to preserve something that is in danger of decaying past recovery — I feel the same way when I see an interesting building or a classic airplane rotting away somewhere — but the usual course of action is to choose what you find most worth saving, purchase it from the owner, and restore your new possession. Any other course isn't legal, in most cases, and it isn't here either, in most cases. I care about that, and some of the game creators will care about it too.
[+] [-] tomysshadow|7 years ago|reply
This is actually a place where I differ with BlueMaxima (BlueMaxima is Flashpoint's creator and the writer of the article linked here.) Personally, if I were running the project I would remove a game if the original creator asked, simply out of respect for them.
However, I think that most of the staff involved with Flashpoint would disagree with me here. It is more of a "for now, just go go go and we'll worry about organizing everything and dealing with the repercussions later." There's a lot of Flash games out there to say the least and Flash being discontinued in 2020 leaves us limited time if we hope to save as much as possible.
[+] [-] LocalH|7 years ago|reply
Today's pirates are tomorrow's historians.
[+] [-] llasram|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tekromancr|7 years ago|reply
Especially in situations where a work is entirely digital, and preserving the work does absolutely no harm to the owner of said work.
[+] [-] keymone|7 years ago|reply
Edit: missing word
[+] [-] coldacid|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shmerl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ducttape12|7 years ago|reply
What happens in 5 years when Sony turns off their PS3 servers? And what happens in 10 years when most of the hard drives in those PS3s need replacing?
[+] [-] endgame|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yosefzeev|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jplayer01|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnusci|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]