The following guest post from free-range archivist and software curator Jason Scott is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
At the Internet Archive we have a technical marvel: emulators running in the browser, allowing computer programs—after a fashion and with some limits—to play with a single click. Go here, and you’re battling aliens. Go there, and you’re experiencing what a spreadsheet program was like in 1981. It’s fast, fun, and free.
We also encourage patrons to upload the software that affected their early lives, and to then encourage others to play these programs with a single click. And so, they do—many, many people working through an admittedly odd set of instructions to make these programs live again.
But of the dozens of machines and environments our system supports, one very specific one dwarfs the others in terms of user contributions: thousands and thousands of additions compared to the relative handful of others. And what is that environment?
Flash.
Created in the 1990s through acquisition and focusing its playability within then-nascent browsers, Flash (once Macromedia Flash, later Adobe Flash) was a plug-in and creation environment designed to bring interactivity to websites and provide a quick on-ramp to making some basic applications across various machines. Within a few years, it was something else entirely.
Originally, it was something as simple as a website where rolling your mouse over a button made it light up or play a sound. Soon it became little animations playing in a splash screen. Some machines had their resources taxed by this alternate website technology—but soon many major sites couldn’t live without it.
Flash flew across the mid-2000s internet sky in a blaze of glory and unbridled creativity. It was the backbone of menus and programs and even critical applications for working with sites. But by 2009, bugs and compatibility issues, the introduction of HTML5 with many of the same features, and a declaration that Flash would no longer be welcome on Apple’s iOS devices, sent Flash into a spiral that it never recovered from.
But thanks to the Archive’s emulation, Flash lives again, at least as self-contained creations you can play in your browser.
Explore the Flash software library preserved and emulated at the Internet Archive.
What emerges, as thousand of these Flash animations and games arrive, is what part it played in the lives of people now in their twenties and thirties and beyond. “Almost like being given a moment to breathe, or to walk into a museum space and see distant memories hung up on walls as classic art,” our patrons wrote in.
For a rather sizable amount of people using computers from the late 1990s to mid 2000s, before Facebook and Youtube pulled away the need for distractions of a simpler sort, Flash was many people’s game consoles. There were countless people, at work and at home, using Flash sites to play to pass the day and night. Games, animation, and toys to flip through and enjoy. And what there had been to enjoy!
A reasonable tinkerer of Flash’s construction and programming environment could create something functional or straightforward in a day or two of playing around. Someone more driven could, across a week of work and lifting ideas and tutorials from elsewhere, emerge from their screens with an arcade-quality game or a parody movie that got an immediate, heartfelt reaction from a grateful audience. Even when the audience wasn’t quite so grateful, it was easy enough to whip up another experimental work and throw it into the public square to see how it landed.
Without some extensive surveying and research (maybe a future Doctorate of Flash History is out there) we may never know exactly what combinations of ease, nostalgia, and variety have left so many people with such a fondness for Flash. But one thing is clear: its preservation is vital.
Recent events have strengthened the need to keep Flash preserved—for example, shutdowns of the Cartoon Network’s website wiped out hundreds of Flash games and animations that only existed on the site, and will never show up on a DVD or streaming service.
It is everywhere, and nowhere—an easy enough thing to explain, but an impossible thing to transfer over as to the depth and variety of what the garden of creation was. Flash, while under the purview of a single company, became, in contrast to the hundreds of other languages and programs for video and sound, the home for everyone. And now it has a home with the Internet Archive.
About the author
Jason Scott is the Free-Range Archivist and Software Curator of the Internet Archive. His favorite arcade game is Crazy Climber.
I’ve recently begun a personal project of archiving Adobe’s official developer documentation for Flash (and related projects, like Flex) in Markdown format. To my surprise, I discovered that Adobe chose to use a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Converting to Markdown and sharing it in this new format is explicitly allowed! Some of the content is still available on Adobe’s servers, but some has been taken down, so the Wayback Machine has been essential for finding some otherwise lost documentation. Thank you!
While I’m sure that the number of developers that still maintain Flash content is now very small, I think that it’s still worth the effort. For instance, there are actually still occasional Flash game jams that use Ruffle, and some folks are still developing desktop and mobile apps with Adobe AIR, which is now officially maintained by Harman. Others are using projects like OpenFL, which is a custom Haxe version of the Flash API, to which I also contribute. Folks like these still deserve good documentation, and for them, I’m trying to preserve as much as I can.
Anyway, I’ve created a Gist to collect the various repositories where I’m saving different parts of the documentation. I hope that it’s okay that I share it here.
https://gist.github.com/joshtynjala/77aebc21ce9d206b0b82b6330d717461
Flash games and animations were also my childhood too
I once consider Adobe flash to animate my mega-crossover to live as well making mock website of ACME corporation of Ani-toonspiracy, even when Flash’s discontinuation make ACME’s Mock website never realized
I just use BlueMaxima Flashpoint.
I also use Bluemaxima flashpoint too
Flash was the first animation program I encountered.
The reason for retaining Flash primarily lies in the important role it played during the early stages of internet development, becoming the standard platform for multimedia content display. Flash provided rich interactive experiences for websites, supporting animations, games, and video playback, with good cross-platform compatibility. Although Flash has gradually been phased out with the rise of new technologies like HTML5, it remains the carrier for many historical contents and applications during the technological transition. Retaining Flash helps maintain the accessibility of these legacy resources and ensures that they do not lose their value entirely during the transition process.