Flash Back: An “oral” history of Flash

I don’t know what the first video game I ever played was. I would have been too young to remember. It very likely could have been a Flash game running in a web browser, patiently downloaded over a dialup connection.

I got interested in computers at an early age, but it would take me a lot longer to really appreciate what a miracle and nightmare Flash was. Flash was a huge force that enabled many great applications but also loaded huge liabilities on millions of personal computers. Flash set our expectations of what the web could do, defined online culture, and enabled creative expressions online that HTML (et al.) couldn’t deliver. Yet it also had constant problems with security, performance, and accessibility, on top of installing a single corporate gatekeeper to the “full” web. It took hold on the web in only a few years after its creation, but would take about a decade to completely replace.

I was a toddler when Flash was born. Now I’m a grownup and Flash has been dead for a few years. Everyone’s already left the funeral, so this is a good time for me to look back at what it was like to surf the web with Flash. Let’s look around the corpse and read the bones.

“What is Flash? Why use Flash?” A screenshot of Macromedia’s pitch for Flash in August 2000.

A hole in the web

The World Wide Web was originally created in 1989 just for passing documents around.¹ For that purpose, the earliest forms of HTML worked fine: basic formatting, hyperlinks, images. However, as the 90s went on, the web grew more and more into the mainstream. More and more participants in the web wanted more than just documents.

In the 90s, the big buzzwords in technology were “Internet” (with always-uppercase “I”) and “multimedia”. Up until this point, multimedia on the web was just images, and if there was video or sound, web browsers would send you to your computer’s media player, like QuickTime or Windows Media Player. In terms of interactivity, there was pretty much just submitting forms and the earliest versions of JavaScript.

The web clearly had a hole. The web needed more multimedia and interactivity. Multiple solutions emerged to fill that hole: Java applets, Shockwave, and Flash were notable contenders.

When a page had embedded content, like a .swf Flash file, web browsers would leave a hole in the web page and call up the appropriate program to fill that hole with content and handle user inputs. This kind of plug-in system would remain in all major web browsers until about the mid-to-late 10s.

Light as a flash

By the late 00s, broadband connections were commonplace but my family was still on dialup. Since loading anything on the scale of megabytes took multiple minutes, I’d go to the library if I really needed high-speed internet access. Otherwise, at home, I’d stay away from anything that was bandwidth-intensive, like online videos. I preferred lighter content, like forums and Wikipedia. Guess what else worked well on home dialup.

For a variety of reasons,² Flash won out among all the “rich web” plugins and achieved widespread adoption on the web. Installing Flash was practically a necessary step after getting a new computer.

Most notably, the Flash plug-in had a comparatively short start-up time and Flash content usually loaded quickly. Flash was born in a time when connecting to the internet via dialup was still commonplace, so being light on bandwidth was an especially welcome feature. In those dialup days, I would actually check the file sizes before I committed to waiting to load Flash content. That wait would be a good time to go get a snack or continue reading through a long Wikipedia article.

As a reference for how much loading times mattered, consider the earliest episodes of Happy Tree Friends. It was one of the first ever animated shows to be made specifically for online distribution³. As part of making it online-friendly, the creators reused many graphics and reduced the frame rate to reduce file size, knowing that many viewers were on dialup⁴. The very first episode of the show was released in 1999 as a Flash movie and it was less than a megabyte. At dialup speeds of 56 kilobits per second, it would still take about a minute to load the episode. An equivalent video file would have been many megabytes.

Loading screen from an episode of Happy Tree Friends. 'Now loading; Cartoon violence; Happy Tree Friends is not recommended for small children or big babies.' — Many Flash movies had loading screens. It was uncommon for them to just stream data, like we expect with video today. You’d want to fully load in before starting all 5 MB of that movie. Now that’s big!

A vector for creativity

The first song I found and listened to online was Weird Al’s Angry White Boy Polka, set to a music video animated in Flash, around 2003-2004. The web was the home for independent animation that would never make it on TV or get attention anywhere else. My friends and I consumed a lot of Flash animation and we talked about them a lot. That included series like There She Is!!, Xiao Xiao, and Animator vs. Animation, which were, at the time, distributed as Flash movies. The creators were among many who built followings through their animated series.

The music didn’t stop there for me. Everything I knew about Star Wars came from watching Star Wars Gangsta Rap in 2004 and my friends and I reciting our favourite lyrics from it. I didn’t know anything about Star Wars then and I’m not interested in the series now, so it’s still a big chunk of what I know about it. The fan-made Flash animation for the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny by Lemon Demon from 2005 was absolutely huge — even my classmates who weren’t as Flash-brained as me all knew the song because of that Flash movie, and at 13 million views, it’s the most viewed movie in Newgrounds history.

Of course, Sturgeon’s Law applies to Flash animation as well. There were plenty of unremarkable, low-quality movies, often using ripped Mario or Sonic sprites or featuring stick figures fighting⁵. Finding the good stuff was obviously a challenge, but even effort levels mildly increased beyond that stood out. This was how plenty of people got their start in learning to animate, and some of these people have gone on to be relevant on YouTube, Newgrounds, or other social media, or have even entered the animation industry.

In the middle of a crowd of onlookers, the cat appears shocked as the rabbit hugs his arm. — *There She Is!!* is a Flash movie series that ran from 2004 to 2008, with an extra episode in 2020.

I was also certainly no stranger to the other major sector of the web that Flash ruled over: web games. Pretty much every video game I played until the fading of Flash was a Flash game. For a long time, my family had a crappy PC and I had no budget to buy games from a store, so playing Flash games at no cost was an obvious choice. (I once borrowed a friend’s Spore disc but my computer couldn’t run it.) In the 00s, Steam was nowhere near as comprehensive as it is today.

The computers at school obviously tried to block sites that hosted Flash games, but pretty much all the students knew the loopholes. Viewing game pages through Google Search’s cached results or Google Translate’s web page translation mode dodged the filter. And one university’s summer computer camp had a website that hosted a bunch of popular games, maybe ostensibly as part of an HTML crafting exercise for the camp kids, but that site would stay up all year. The university site was not blocked, so maybe that’s why the camp’s game site was unblocked as well.

There are lots of games I remember fondly, but this article isn’t supposed to be a pure nostalgia listicle, so let’s talk about notable specimens.

Just like with animators, plenty of game makers have their origins in Flash, with the open web being the natural place to distribute their games: it was relatively easy to publish a game and really easy to play one, which lowers the bar for getting players. Starting a game was quick and easy, quitting was as well, and it didn’t cost the player anything either way, so the game didn’t have to be a masterpiece. And since Flash was Flash regardless of operating system, a Flash game was pretty much automatically cross-platform. Before the rise of Steam and Itch, putting Flash games on the web was the easiest way for indie devs to get their games out to the world, and with very little friction to players. Honestly, web games still have that advantage today; Steam still has you sign in and download chunky game files before you can get to playing.

Some titles that you might recognize come from the Flash era, like Submachine, Bloons, Meat Boy, and the Binding of Isaac. There are other games that are notable today that are made by Flash game dev alumni, like Cult of the Lamb and Among Us.⁶ I credit Flash web games as the major reason why I’m into PC gaming now. If I was already using that crappy computer for other stuff, I might as well also use it to play games.

Screenshot of Meat Boy gameplay. Meat Boy jumps to the top of a tower. — *Meat Boy*, this Flash game, grew to become *Super Meat Boy*, a multi-platform classic.

Ultimately, the combination of the web’s utter openness and Flash’s multimedia and scripting capabilities meant that the web was the premier platform for indie media, and the launchpad for many creative careers and beloved titles today. For Flash, TV executives and game store shelf space weren’t obstacles to the public.

A cursed boon

Around the time of a “take your kids to work day” at my dad’s workplace when I was 5, he showed me the website for the company he worked at.⁷ It wowed me how flashy and dynamic the site was. It was all Flash. Just one big Flash embed, completely bypassing any need for HTML or the web browser itself, really. This allowed the site to have nicer animations than with just GIFs alone, as well as have sounds and dynamically updating content. It looked like such a cool idea for a site design.

In a way, Flash was like a powerup for the web. It enabled so much more stuff beyond what the web (at the time) could do, while coming on the same delivery mechanism that carried HTML files to you. On top of animations and games, it was also viable for many other multimedia-related purposes. For example, Flash slideshows just worked on the web. PowerPoint slideshows weren’t easily viewable on a web page! Flash was also popular for delivering online course modules and could also be used to build full-on apps. And why not? It could accomplish the WORA (write once, run anywhere) dream that Sun Microsystems was trying to market the Java programming language for, but perhaps better than Java itself, purely because everyone had Flash installed, but not necessarily Java.

Flash was especially compelling because it looked and worked the same regardless of operating system or web browser. While Flash matured, the browser wars raged⁸, with browsers from different vendors offering different features, conflicting interpretations of HTML, and straight-up bugs that affected the appearance of a web page. It was hard to make a site that looked consistent across different browsers, but Flash could resolve all this. Since all these browsers left a hole in the page for Flash content, that meant that no matter the user’s browser, an all-Flash site would be rendered by the exact same Flash Player plugin, so a web designer could know for sure that an all-Flash site would look consistent. That also meant that designers had total control over the typography of the site. They could use a custom font and Flash would render it, so they didn’t have to rely on the user to have that font installed on their system. It would take until the 10s for web fonts to become common; before that, Microsoft’s core fonts for the web were the best designers could hope for.

These benefits of Flash were great and very practical, but they came at a cost that was hard to shake off.

Flash had a lot of security issues. Since it wasn’t part of a browser itself, it was out of reach for browser vendors to do anything about the vulnerabilities. It was entirely up to Macromedia, and later Adobe, to fix them, if they even did. And if so, it was still up to users to download and install the update.

Flash also had performance problems. Merely having the Flash Player exist on a page would consume more CPU than an “idle” and fully loaded web page. This was especially apparent with banner ads,⁹ which used Flash for animations and sometimes interactive elements, so your web browsing would be slowed down by the dead weight of your CPU having to do work to render ads you never cared to see.

Unlike the web, Flash was not an open standard. It was controlled by a single company who had all the say in how Flash worked and what systems could have Flash. Macromedia and later Adobe held the keys to the “rich” web. We know with hindsight that having one corporate gatekeeper to what we want is bad for everyone, like it was with Microsoft and Internet Explorer.¹⁰ There were attempts to address this situation, like the Gnash project, which tried to recreate the Flash Player completely from scratch, with fully free code. Otherwise, though, if you were not willing to give in to Macromedia/Adobe’s hegemony over the web, you were relegated to the old, “document” web.

There were also plenty of accessibility issues with Flash. Its powerful design capabilities let irresponsible designers get away with making content that was hard to see and understand, and screen readers often struggled with Flash content. The fact that Flash content completely bypassed the document format of HTML also meant that it was also hard to index and archive Flash-heavy sites.

That site from the company my dad worked at was a performance sucker, used a proprietary program to go around the browser, and excluded a whole chunk of web users without a good reason. They got all those nice effects in, though! That site isn’t even properly viewable anymore, even on the Wayback Machine, because of the poor indexability of Flash content.

In hindsight, the accessibility problems with that site were a bad look for a company that made assistive technologies.

Fading light

Coming into the 10s, it was clear that these problems with Flash would never go away. More devices in more form factors than ever could access the web by then, and even if Flash Player was available for those devices, the experience was often terrible. The drive to replace Flash got an especially strong boost with the popularity of the iPhone, which staunchly refused to allow any Flash content, not just in the web browser, but even in apps themselves. With all of these things we wanted out of the web, we might as well have the web itself provide the capabilities directly rather than pass to Flash. Newly developing editions of HTML and CSS were starting to bring in some of the richness of Flash to the native web.

There was one tricky part, though: Flash did a lot of things. It would take developing a lot of new features for the web before Flash could be completely replaced. Flash-based media players could be replaced by <video> and <audio> elements. Drawing graphics could be done inside a <canvas>. Interactive UI animations could be done with CSS transitions and animations. All of these and more would take about a decade to emerge and stabilize before the replacement process was truly complete.

The iPhone is often cited as the reason for why Flash started to decline, since it led to significant user demand to have Flash-free sites. However, I think Flash’s fate was truly sealed once Google made an HTML advertisement designer app, with a roughly Flash Pro-like interface, built to create animated ads using the relatively new CSS animation features. With that program, the last commercial desire to use Flash was gone.

Glimmer of a legacy

Flash was the medium for a huge amount of online culture, and even with browsers dropping support for it, people don’t want to forget. There have been significant efforts to preserve Flash content, like the Flashpoint Archive, which archives over 1.6 terabytes of Flash content, and Ruffle, a Flash emulator that runs in modern web browsers, taking the place of Flash Player. Newgrounds, a major sponsor of Ruffle, now hosts an annual Flash Forward event, which encourages the community to make new Flash movies and games to celebrate Newgrounds’s Flash heritage, and they’re still playable thanks to Ruffle.

A green cartoon creature happily looks at you, with a soccer ball held under a foot — One of the entries for Flash Forward 2025: *Garry!* by SomeDoodles on Newgrounds

Today, web games are better than ever. Many popular game-making tools, like Godot, SDL, and TIC-80, can produce games that work in web browsers, which can now run high-performance code and even 3D graphics without any plugins. We can just have “full” games on the web now; some Steam games even put out web-playable demos.

Flash made it easy for independent animators to spread their works and legitimized using the web as a medium for animation, with professional studios also targeting it. Flash still sees use in the animation industry, but now renamed to Adobe Animate.

Despite all of its problems, Flash showed that web developers and users expected more out of the web than it could offer natively at the time. The whole “passing documents around” concept of the web wasn’t enough, and Flash was in the right place and the right time to be picked up as the solution.

And yet, because of its influence on what we expected of websites, we couldn’t accept returning to a web without Flash. It took a long time, but everything Flash did, we can now do with open web standards. We hardly expect people to pass files and software around; we expect to be able to view files and run apps right here in the web browser we already have open.

I’m glad Flash is dead, but we still owe a lot to it.