A quick story about flash player and browser games golden age

Whether it was a cursed obscurity now lost to the depths of internet history or a massively successful time-waster that subsequently grew into a multi-million dollar series, everyone recalls their favorite browser games (like Doom, Trials, Super Meat Boy, or Bejeweled, to name a few).

Many millennials' earliest internet experiences were defined by the golden age of browser games in the early 2000s and aside the efforts of games like Agar.io or Snake.Io and many online communities for browser games like this one, browser videogames are facing now a dark age.

With the introduction of tools like Flash, people with little technical knowledge were able to create everything from gorgeously animated personal games to interactive oddities, democratizing a hitherto monopolized medium into a flood of unrestrained amateur creative expression. Suddenly, anyone (including a lot of young people) could publish a game with the potential to reach millions, no matter how strange, unusual, primitive, or contentious it was.

Nostalgia for this era's vast library of weird home-grown browser games is so strong that, in the run-up to Flash's demise in December 2020, many odes have been penned bemoaning the irreversible loss of not only digital history but also our childhoods.

The browser game represented our generation's first tentative steps toward unrestricted online freedom and independence, with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails. Web browser games allowed millennials to carve out a space for themselves on websites like Newgrounds and Kongregate, where we got to define the rules rather than succumbing to the more corporate restrictions of platforms like Yahoo Games, long before the social media platforms of Web 2.0 normalized the concept of "content creators."

Web browser games became a digital forbidden fruit as they swept the world's schoolyards and college campuses, forcing young people to devise workarounds for administrative firewalls (and winning). They were the first virtual uprisings and microphones we had.

Despite Flash's demise, the spirit of the early online browser games lives on, thanks to the internet and the millennials who played them.

Through browser games, we shaped the web. "The scene of a bunch of vulgar websites that were simply extremely punk, very counterculture spawned Flash games... It wasn't like anything else I'd seen on the web. You had complete freedom to do and say whatever you wanted "Edmund McMillen, the acclaimed developer of Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, began his career as a 19-year-old on Newgrounds. "It was total mayhem. That was part of its allure as well as its undoing."

It was similar to the early web's version of tweeting or generating TikToks, but with games instead of short-form texts and videos.

"You could essentially prototype it in a few days, post it online, and see how well it received. I mean, there was a significant amount of trash. But with so many people producing games and taking risks, you were sure to hit on something excellent at some point."

Like the modern-day upvote or likes on social platforms, the community created around rapid-fire prototyping effectively cast votes on what worked and what didn't. These sites were among the first to use gamified rating systems to organize the mountains of junk that inevitably result from allowing everyone on the internet to create content.

"Early interactive online work based in Flashwas this creative maelstrom," said Nathalie Lawhead, who began making browser games like BlueSuburbia in high school and still develops true Flash games as well as downloaded releases that pay respect to browser game aesthetics. "Because it had such a low threshold for sharing, where you didn't have to download anything, ideas could spread quickly and effortlessly."

The golden period of browser gaming was, at its core, the first time many millennials felt at home in a virtual environment. Millions of young people found a forum to openly express themselves and connect through digital creation in browser game communities, which embodied early web culture.

"It was absolutely about seeing, or almost talking to someone through abstract poetry," McMillen explained. "You can't help but put a piece of yourself in it," he observed, as designers typically resembled how they drew.

It provided Lawhead a sense of creative freedom that she didn't have in the actual world as a young child, allowing her to adopt an anonymous artistic persona.

"I didn't have to ask galleries or newspapers for permission to use their space. I could simply take up room and display my work, "she stated "Nobody realized it was just some adolescent creating all of this... That's exactly what Flash gave 'nobodies' the power to do."

Games like Lawhead's would have been dismissed as too creative and arcane in a corporate setting, while work like McMillen's would have been dismissed as too stupid or rude (his words, not ours). "But, you know, you're just among a lot of other freaks doing strange stuff on the internet," he explained.

The backbone of browser games' innovative golden age of play was also making video games more accessible to everyone.

Flash didn't just make game design more accessible to a broader range of indie artists. Its technical limitations also led them to create new ways of play, which unwittingly drew in audiences who weren't usual game players. According to Klimmt, Flash wasn't adept at running genres like first-person shooters, which dominated PC and console games. As a result, rather than reflex-based competitive games based on dexterity, web games pioneered strategy genres with challenges based on obtaining knowledge for difficult issue and puzzle solutions.

Browser games are credited with the creation of genres such as tower defense games, which subsequently evolved into blockbusters such as Clash of Clans. Other casual smartphone games, such as Angry Birds, were nearly perfect replicas of Crush the Castle from 2009. They were also pioneers of persistent game environments, in which a virtual environment continues to evolve even when the user isn't there, which became a cornerstone of casual simulations like Farmville, according to Klimmt.

According to demographic data, women and girls prefer simulation, puzzle, and strategy games to shooters. It's no surprise, then, that women became the driving force behind the mobile game renaissance, with many of the most successful iPhone games incorporating genres that originated in browser games.

The browser style also allows you to play anywhere, at any time, minimizing the need for pricey PCs and consoles while also allowing for more easily integrated modes of play into people's daily lives.

"You might simply go to a page and start playing. When the concept of 'play' is genuinely integrated into the web experience, the bar is quite low "Lawhead stated.

Games were no longer restricted to certain machines or software, but instead resided alongside your email inbox and Ask Jeeves search on our primary portal into the online world.

"It was so quick," McMillen remarked, "all these millions of games were just a click away." "You'd simply open a new tab and be playing a new game in seconds. It appealed to my desire for immediate fulfillment."

Years later, the browser's rapid pleasure as an ideal time-waster would be replaced by social media networks' quick dopamine spikes. It's no coincidence that all of those platforms employed gamification to snag as much of our attention as possible, applying game design's incentive systems to human contact.

Browser games were one of the first to merge online experiences with regular offline life, according to Klimmt, because they could be played anywhere at any time.

"Browser games broadened the spectrum of situations and locales where gaming may take place," he stated. "They might be able to accompany you all day." Switching between an ongoing video game world and one's real-life environment becomes a very dynamic experience."

Later, in the always-online era of omnipresent cellphones, this type of mixed reality would become standard.