Comments
By cableshaft 2026-03-0421:3112 reply I made Flash Games back in the day. Here's my old profile on Newgrounds: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/
One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since, is an environment that both coders and artists could use. I'd collaborate with an artist, they'd make their animations within an FLA, send it to me, and then I'd copy+paste into the project file, and it'd just work. I could even tweak their animations if need be to remove a frame here or there to tighten the animations and make it feel more fluid, etc.
That being said, I'm not sure I could go back to it now. I've been working with Love2D lately, and I prefer that (especially for the version control). FLA version control was always me going 'GameName-1.fla', 'GameName-2.fla', or when I got a little smarter 'GameName-Date.fla'. Eventually they let you split out the actionscript files into its own files, and that was better for version control, but you still had the binary mess of the FLA file.
But all these sprite-based game editors just can't handle the crazy intricate animations that vector-based Flash games could handle. Porting one of my old games (Clock Legends) that had hundreds of frames of hand drawn animation for a boss that filled the screen would be ridiculously huge nowadays, but the FLA for that was like 23MB, I believe (I'll need to hunt it down, I have it somewhere), and several MB of that were for the songs in the game.
Excited for this project though. It deserves to come back in some form.
By qingcharles 2026-03-055:308 reply Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?
I remember trying to produce a Flash renderer in C# when we wrote DudeFactory to render out the characters after you used the Flash app to put all their clothes and accessories on. I think we cheated in the end and pre-rendered large PNGs of them all and used .NET to just layer them all with instructions sent from Flash.
SVG + CSS + JS was hailed as the Flash-killer. But authoring tools never materialized. The tech stack can render the same things, but the process of creating anything beyond a static image in SVG is night and day compared to making the same thing in Flash
By ecocentrik 2026-03-0515:211 reply Flash should have transitioned into an authoring tool for SVG + CSS + JS but it just took a knee because so many people hated flash for all of its warts by the time SVG and Canvas moved vector graphics rendering to the browser. Flash was a real pain the ass for most web users and Web 2.0 technologies did kill it.
By Someone 2026-03-0515:56 > Flash should have transitioned into an authoring tool for SVG + CSS + JS
Didn’t it? IIRC, Adobe had such a tool at some moment, and part of it seems to (somewhat) live on [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Flex:
“Apache Flex, formerly Adobe Flex, is a software development kit (SDK) for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich web applications based on the Adobe Flash platform. […] Adobe donated Flex to the Apache Software Foundation
[…]
In 2014, the Apache Software Foundation started a new project called FlexJS to cross-compile ActionScript 3 to JavaScript to enable it to run on browsers that do not support Adobe Flash Player and on devices that do not support the Adobe AIR runtime. In 2017, FlexJS was renamed to Apache Royale. The Apache Software Foundation describes the current iteration of Apache Royale as an open-source frontend technology that allows a developer to code in ActionScript 3 and MXML and target web, mobile devices and desktop devices on Apache Cordova all at once”
[1] I may be wrong though. It’s not easy figuring out what Flash code ended up in which of Adobe’s Flash-like products over time.
By hobofan 2026-03-0514:36 I think Rive[0] is quite competitive with what was possible back then in covering the full authoring stack.
[0]: https://rive.app
By troupo 2026-03-055:52 > Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?
This sounds like a "is there anything you can do in C++ or Javascript that you couldn't do in Brainfuck?".
Flash was a complete authoring environment. Yes, you can replicste the output in JS+CSS (or more likely JS+Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU), but at what cost and with how much effort?
> Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?
probably not. The only difference is that it'd be build once display everywhere. Flash meant that everything looked the same regardless of browser or platform.
Its a lot better nowadays, but its not as easy as flash was.
The _key_ thing thats missing is the flash IDE/designer. There are no compelling editors/environments that allows both artists and coders to work in the same space.
Sure I can use Illustrator to make graphics, but there are no animation systems out there that allow me to animate well (I can render a unity app to HTML/JS but thats not quite the same)
By WillAdams 2026-03-0515:37 Guaranteed deployment, and the lack of an IDE which works for both programmers and artists were definitely the two advantages Flash had.
I'd really like to find a replacement which clicks for me the way it did --- started out w/ its predecessor, Futurewave Smartsketch (used it on PenPoint, Mac and Windows, and for Windows, continued using through a succession of pen tablets, most notably my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 which I despair of replacing --- transflective displays went out of vogue).
Yeah, there's two approaches to rendering Flash vector art.
You can turn the curves into polygons, or render them to textures. Ruffle, I recall, makes everything polygons (so it's a little chunky if you zoom in?), and Super Meat Boy rendered everything to textures.
I'm not sure what the actual flash player did, which seems to have pretty decent performance relative to Ruffle in my testing.
Maybe they have some proprietary technique for rendering curves quickly on a GPU? (I read a paper on rendering curves, and there's OpenVG, which I think came later and nobody uses?)
By mfabbri77 2026-03-0518:14 OpenVG is just an API by Kronos group, that was never implemented by hardware vendors on desktop graphic cards (it was specifically created for mobiles, as OpenGL|ES).
Btw, there exists several implementations, with pure CPU rendering (like AmanithVG SRE) and others with GPU backends.
By leviathant 2026-03-0517:10 >Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?
This has more or less been the line from the day Steve Jobs decided Flash would never be available on the iPhone. And it was readily apparent that no one who said that worked in the audio domain. Things are much, much better now, but I remember challenging myself by trying to build a drum machine in HTML, Javascript, and CSS (not wanting to muck about in Canvas at the time) and while I could make it look decent enough, there was no such thing as a solid, reliable clock in Javascript, for about a decade. Just the way you played audio files back varied from browser to browser on the same machine. It was absolute garbage.
In-browser capabilities have basically caught up or exceeded what Flash did - I don't keep up anymore - but to echo other replies, the authoring tools just aren't as accessible. Maybe vibe coding tools close that gap. But the forced sunsetting of Flash set online interactive multimedia back at least a decade. It was never my main career path, but I more or less abandoned that fun side quest, and as evidenced by my feeling the need to comment here, it still kind of bums me out.
By RobotToaster 2026-03-059:451 reply Technically you may not even need js, since SVG has integral support for SMIL.
By lukan 2026-03-0512:40 Have you ever tried that out? Last time I checked (some yeqrs ago) wide support (and performance) was not great but more importantly handling I found not great.
Support and performance might have improved, but I think the style is still ugly and good authoring tools non existent.
By pjmlp 2026-03-058:05 2D and 3D games, with good developer and debugging tools.
By AlienRobot 2026-03-0521:201 reply Every time I see SVG mentioned with Flash I just think it's immensely ignorant. No offense, but programmers love to think of "vectors" as SVG because it's all they know. For several years I kept hearing people say "we have HTML5 and SVG now, so we don't need Flash anymore." And with that Flash animations and games were lost forever and I'm still bitter about it.
For artists, SVG is probably the worst vector format imaginable. In fact, I'd say any project that uses SVG as backend is doomed to fail with artists. It's pretty much a red flag at this point that if "supports vector" means "support SVG" they're doing it wrong and just chose the easiest to implement vector graphics because you probably have a billion open source SVG libraries at this point instead of rolling their own proprietary vector rendering algorithm that actually improves the artists' workflow.
To answer your question, the important thing about Flash wasn't the vector rendering but the vector art authoring tools. You could make Inkscape work like Flash, but nobody has done that yet. All you need is a brush tool that automatically does union of shapes of same color and subtraction of shapes of different color so the whole layer is always "flattened" with no shapes overlapping. This is the sort of thing that made Flash exceedingly easy to use for artists. It was a vector art program that worked exactly the same way as a raster digital art program. It thought of vectors not as shapes that the program was going to render but as paint strokes on a canvas.
If you were building a vector art software today you probably would want all sorts of things that SVG doesn't provide, e.g. line art with varying thickness based on tablet pressure (although Flash didn't need this, since you could draw shapes instead of strokes). You might also want to take a look at OpenToonz' vector implementation, which has "fills" that automatically expand when you change the enclosing strokes and an indexed color palette system, and CSP's line art vectors that let you use textured raster brushes with settings like dab scattering in vector strokes.
By the way, I also believe the idea that HTML5 could replace Flash games was insanely stupid. Anyone could make a Flash game and deploy it to web browsers in one click. Do that in HTML? With Javascript? Which means you need to download all these images/audio from the Internet? You want to play it locally? CORS issues, baby! Now you need to turn this mess into an electron app or use the most disgusting build step imaginable to turn whole jpegs into a base64 strings so you can create a single HTML file that is several megabytes. How did the entire world convince themselves that this was an actual replacement of Flash's functionality is honestly beyond me. For Flash websites, sure, you have <video> now, but for everything else that Flash provided there has never been a proper replacement (at least until Godot/Unity started WASM'ing, but that was a long time after).
By Chris2048 2026-03-0611:51 Isn't SVG just a format? For example "line art with varying thickness based on tablet pressure" - isn't that an authoring-tool thing?
By rtpg 2026-03-056:30 It feels like we're fairly close yet so far. Lots of newer tools do have animation and tweening of arbitrary properties but then will just have bitmap image editors instead of a built-in vector editor for example. Or just make it really hard to tie all the stuff together.
The ease at which Flash CSx would just let you draw a circle in a spot, then click on it to get its script file and immediately add a little bit of behavior is magic for prototyping
Thank you for reminding me of the Clock Crew. The Internet used to be fun.
By fuzzy_biscuit 2026-03-050:292 reply Strawberry Clock is our king!
By hrmtst93837 2026-03-0510:43 In my experience what made Flash special wasn't the SWF runtime but teh FLA as a single editable file that bundled timeline, vectors, and code so an artist could hand over an animation and a developer could open the same file and tweak frames without a full rebuild. To recreate that loop I built a pipeline where artists export PNG sequences from Adobe Animate, TexturePacker packs them into atlases, a small tool emits a JSON timeline with frames as {spriteIndex,durationMs,easing}, and an AssetPostprocessor in Unity or an import plugin in Godot hot-reloads that JSON into AnimationClips so timing can be nudged in-editor. I've found the practical tradeoff is bigger assets and more import complexity, so make your timeline format human-readable for sensible git diffs, keep per-animation metadata minimal for easier merges, and accept that you'll be debugging the importer at 2am while an artist asks for 'one frame faster' but iteration speed pays off.
By notpushkin 2026-03-053:58 I feel we need a modular verdion of Flash: standalone editor that produces just the animations with Flash-like mechanics, SDKs for major OSS game frameworks, and possibly an editor component you can use in IDEs. You then drop in animation file(s) and track them in VCS like any other asset.
Edit: but of course, the standalone variant should work for non-game animations as well!
By dizhn 2026-03-0510:05 Before opening the comments I made a bet with myself that the top comment would be about how someone made flash games in the 2000s and nothing really replaced it in the coming years. :)
By wesammikhail 2026-03-054:342 reply God I love the look of those old school sites. Takes me back to a happier time. Whatever happened? :(
By andai 2026-03-0513:17 Remember how mobile sites were the same thing except with less personality? And then they figured out they could remove what little personality remained and call it progress? And then they realized they could do that on desktop too?
By throawayonthe 2026-03-058:24 newgrounds is still around though
> is an environment that both coders and artists could use.
Maybe Rive fits this well enough? (Not affiliated, just looked into it at a time from a render engine perspective)
By dnpls 2026-03-0513:08 I came here thinking the same. To me, it looks like Rive is the closest tool with the highest potential to be a Flash replacement.
By wink 2026-03-0511:07 The versioning was indeed a bit of a pain, also anything with dynamic input.
I was pretty proud of a solution where we could feed a web CMS that had a flash and a html version with the same editable text fields. IIRC you could grab the input of some fields from a text file and Flash didn't care where these came from, so on save the CMS just spit out a bunch of text files in a folder. That must have been around 2001.
I've tried Love2D and enjoyed it but just found the lack of support for Lua was tough - how do you handle debugging and things?
By a1o 2026-03-0513:18 I remember I could connect love2d to the IDE I used and debug lua just fine with it. Which IDE you were using?
Have you tried Rive? It seems to have a lot of potential for game development.
By embedding-shape 2026-03-0513:541 reply It's a UI authoring toolkit, you could do entire games in it I suppose, but you'd be fighting against it, rather than being helped by it.
Better to go the route of doing Spine2D animations then leverage a real game engine like Godot or Unity and load the animations there.
But then you're essentially back to "traditional game development" which is very different from what you could do with Macromedia's Flash back in the day.
By hobofan 2026-03-0514:39 > but you'd be fighting against it, rather than being helped by it
I think this was also true of doing game development in Flash. Some people here might be looking back at Flash with rose-tinted nostalgia glasses.
By 0x1ceb00da 2026-03-0510:262 reply Original adobe tools for flash should still work on windiws/wine. Why don't people use them to make things?
Flash died once people no longer had a flash player. The tooling might also need updating if the apps being built are targeting today’s touch devices.
By andai 2026-03-0513:16 Indeed they do, at least once a year :)
I built a flash crawler to index all Flash while at Adobe. It started with Alexa top 1M I think then crawled. This was 2008-2010 I think so we had to do a lot of custom stuff, but we basically crawled then ran a headless Firefox with a custom headless Flash player that dumped a ton of data so also analyzed every flash at runtime and indexed all of that.
We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest to handle all of this. Had issues with max floor weights and what not. Then had to upgrade the RAM on on the cluster. No remote hands. Every operation was a trip to a really cold place.
Used a lot of early stage stuff like Nutch, Hadoop, HBase etc. Everything was then processed and dumped to an SQL database with a nice UI on top. It took a few weeks to set it up, then we passed it to a team of interns that built the SQL database and UI on top. They learned a ton of stuff. Some are now in the Bay Area.
The tool uncovered a ton of security issues.
It was fun building it. I wonder if Adobe kept the data. It could be useful and/or good donation for the Computer History Museum.
By adithyassekhar 2026-03-0423:111 reply Thanks for sharing. It's stories like these I've read since childhood that got me into this. Those little adventures into remote places to work on some computers. This was my version of Indiana jones.
But everyone's in an AWS world right now.
It looks like there's a a bit of reversal in some areas (e.g. ML) and it may make sense to have more geographically distributed (edge) compute so maybe we'll get more diversity in the currently cloud-dominated space.
This said, it was always cool when we could control the entire stack, but the reality was that once we scaled things up, we had to throw things over the fence to IT, DevOps, SRE and whatever name evolutions there were and the reality is AWS/GCE/Azure made things easier than dealing with these teams internally.
By viccis 2026-03-057:09 >we had to throw things over the fence to IT, DevOps, SRE and whatever name evolutions there were and the reality is AWS/GCE/Azure made things easier than dealing with these teams internally
Anyone who was a dev during the "everyone is devops" fad for a while knows the pain of building something with these kinds of dependencies. Being able to claw back my time from operations on my company's dime is enticing.
This was around when we were trying to get Flash to work on the first iPhone, so we had a hackathon for a week. Since I was a distributed systems "hacker", I ended up doing what was needed :) and there were lots of questions related to the sizing of flash on web pages and what not. That's what started it - I simple python script that I refined during the hackathon to get the embed parameters etc.
But once I started processing the data, it became a thing and we made a small cross-team team to get this going. We eventually expanded the effort in a few different directions and wanted to do a Flash analytics, but ended up with the internal tool only due to privacy concerns.
I remember using that tool internally! Personally I think I only used it to get stats of which features/APIs were popular. But I think other teams used it for QA/conformance, like finding content that occurred in the wild but wasn't covered by test cases.
By random3 2026-03-055:02 Hahaha. Always cool to find users of the tools/products you build, including the obscure ones, and on HN no less :))
Heck yeah.
I've said it a million times, but I stand by Flash being the most fun development environment ever made.
Being able to draw your cartoons, make them a movie clip, export to code, edit things around without having to re-count all the frames, built in hit-detection, etc. It's a blast to write software for Flash, and I am not sure I've ever had more fun than being a teenager developing Flash games in my bedroom with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro (or was it Flash 8? I can't remember).
Now, I'll admit that part of that was because I was a teenager at the time, and programming was still a cool novel thing to me, but I do think that the platform was uniquely fun and interactive, and I have been chasing that high for awhile without being able to find something to fully replace it. Stuff like Construct and GameMaker and stuff are pretty cool and fun, but they still don't really hit the same for me that Flash did.
If we can have a new Flash, I will be very happy.
I think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.
Flash created a medium. The particular genius of the authoring tool gave rise to a whole style of animation and game and thing-in-between that only existed in its time and could have only been created with the tool at hand. Software should aspire to this.
By tombert 2026-03-053:36 Well said, and I completely agree.
Since Flash was an animation-first piece of software that still had a fairly robust scripting system, it was able to create very unique and interesting pieces of media that can kind of only exist as they are.
People aren't making full on TV cartoons in Construct or GameMaker. This isn't a dig at those tools, they're good software, but the animation parts of them are targeted much more towards "animation for games".
By KaiserPro 2026-03-0515:32 From what I recall part of https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386224/ was animated in flash, if not all.
I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago.
If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020.
If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authoring tech.
By fenomas 2026-03-054:02 They would have if they could have - answered here:
By KaiserPro 2026-03-0515:33 It was a power play between apple and Adobe.
The iphone was underpowered, and apple decided that they could brazen their way out of not having flash support.
It turned into a movement, but that was never a given.
There would still be the security issues, but yea this is still true
Sure, maybe, but I think if it were FOSS'd back in ~2005, then these security issues could be addressed by a larger set of eyes, including the browser-makers themselves.
If this hypothetical universe happened, I think we'd have had something akin to WASM much earlier. Flash already had its own bytecode and VM, and even had something roughly like Emscripten [1] to compile existing C++ code to Flash.
By DonHopkins 2026-03-059:572 reply ESR's "many eyes" quote in his "Linus's Law" is unmitigated bullshit. And Linux Torvalds should not be blamed for it, since it wasn't his law, ESR just named it after him to get attention. Hardly anyone actually reads code, and the few people actually qualified to find bugs by reading huge piles of buggy code dumped into the public domain when a company abandons it have much more important things to do with their time.
If the many eyes that Macromedia and Adobe paid to work full time on Flash couldn't prevent the need to push out Flash security patches several times a week, the code is fundamentally flawed far beyond the point that the few much less qualified people who might actually take their unpaid spare time to look at it are able to finally find and fix all the bugs.
The major browser developers have enough on their hands designing new open standards and writing and debugging new code, without having to spend any of their time burning their eyes and brains looking at free abandoned obsolete toxic waste code dumps. And ESR certainly isn't going to chip in and help them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43133598
>He made up the ridiculous "many eyes" quote himself, then misnamed it "Linus's Law" to avoid personal responsibility and shift the blame to innocent Linus Torvalds, who never said such a stupid thing, and which HeartBleed and many other eyeballable bugs proved terribly wrong and misguided.
>About which the salty security expert Theo de Raadt famously said "Oh right, let's hear some of that "many eyes" crap again. My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law
>In Facts and Fallacies about Software Engineering, Robert Glass refers to the law as a "mantra" of the open source movement, but calls it a fallacy due to the lack of supporting evidence and because research has indicated that the rate at which additional bugs are uncovered does not scale linearly with the number of reviewers; rather, there is a small maximum number of useful reviewers, between two and four, and additional reviewers above this number uncover bugs at a much lower rate.[4] While closed-source practitioners also promote stringent, independent code analysis during a software project's development, they focus on in-depth review by a few and not primarily the number of "eyeballs".[5]
>The persistence of the Heartbleed security bug in a critical piece of code for two years has been considered a refutation of Raymond's dictum.[6][7][8][9] Larry Seltzer suspects that the availability of source code may cause some developers and researchers to perform less extensive tests than they would with closed source software, making it easier for bugs to remain.[9] In 2015, the Linux Foundation's executive director Jim Zemlin argued that the complexity of modern software has increased to such levels that specific resource allocation is desirable to improve its security. Regarding some of 2014's largest global open source software vulnerabilities, he says, "In these cases, the eyeballs weren't really looking".[8] Large scale experiments or peer-reviewed surveys to test how well the mantra holds in practice have not been performed.[10]
>Empirical support of the validity of Linus's law[11] was obtained by comparing popular and unpopular projects of the same organization. Popular projects are projects with the top 5% of GitHub stars (7,481 stars or more). Bug identification was measured using the corrective commit probability, the ratio of commits determined to be related to fixing bugs. The analysis showed that popular projects had a higher ratio of bug fixes (e.g., Google's popular projects had a 27% higher bug fix rate than Google's less popular projects). Since it is unlikely that Google lowered its code quality standards in more popular projects, this is an indication of increased bug detection efficiency in popular projects.
By tombert 2026-03-0516:18 Man you really took issue with a small part of what I said.
Writing forty paragraphs about your opinion of the “many eyes” thing is interesting enough, but I stand by what I said. If Flash player had been FOSS I think it could have been integrated into browser standards and you’d have browser makers able to fix things and integrate better sandboxing since it could be part of the standard.
By matja 2026-03-0515:02 I think it is still more likely that a project can be improved if everyone has access to the source code vs not having access to any source code. Are there counterexamples to that?
By dwighttk 2026-03-0512:00 I enjoyed flash games… even made one with some friends.
I hated flash only for their video player being so widespread despite immediately redlining my Mac’s cpu and holding it there during the entire experience.
(Okay also security issues, but that was more like adding the ammunition to getting rid of the video player)
By Brajeshwar 2026-03-053:201 reply I started my career as a Programmer and did a lot of programmatic designs. Unfortunately, I’m not artistic. So, my tools of choice for Design were Code and Mathematics.
Early on, I saw my colleagues working in Flash but didn’t notice anything that interested me. I don’t quite remember the exact chain of events, but I think it all started when I saw a friend writing code called “ASfunction” inside Flash, “What? You can write code to make the drawings do stuff?”
So, that was the magic; I can code and see things happen in real-time (no compilation, no render). And that was the only thing I did for quite a while.
Unfortunately, the Flash IDE was a sloth. I spend most of my time writing ActionScript in TextPad and compiling it with a CLI called MTASC (from the same developer behind HAXE.org).[1] If memory serves me well, I used to maintain the ActionScript syntax for TextPad.[2]
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2005/haxe-programming-language/
2. https://brajeshwar.com/2002/textpad-syntax-file-for-asmx/
By tombert 2026-03-053:40 Yeah, I actually got into Flash because I wanted to be an animator some day. I made some crappy cartoons but sadly my art skills never really improved, even with a fair amount of practice.
But in the process I learned about ActionScript and found I had a lot of fun coding things and playing with different programming constructs.
I keep meaning to try out haxe, it looks neat enough, but to me it's still kind of missing half of what I liked about Flash, which was the animation tooling.
I disagree with it being the most fun, because I would also consider TP/Delphi and C++ Builder.
Now I do agree that even something like Unity or PlayCanvas fail short of Flash's game development experience, because the browser debugging for 2D and 3D development sucks.
By tombert 2026-03-058:25 I have heard lovely things about Delphi’s and C++ builder’s fun factor (maybe from you on this very forum actually :) ), but I have not used those so I cannot speak to it.
At least of the stuff I have used, Flash is the most fun. Admittedly I never really got into any other kind of graphics-first development like VisualBasic and the like. Flash just spoke to me for some reason.
By matula 2026-03-0515:37 > a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro...
This is an under-appreciated aspect of Flash's popularity, and probably a reason why Animate didn't have the same appeal. A kid could get a "free" cracked copy and make fun things.... and maybe not help Adobe/Macromedia's bottom-line, it DID help the general ecosystem.
Rive seems fine, but monthly subscriptions need to die in a fire. I'm not going to pay $10/month to allow me to build some stupid animation idea I have every few months. There are a few, like GameMaker, that do one-time pricing... but even that doesn't scratch the same itch Flash did for me.
It's just selling a scam. I've never been impressed by a flash game, but I'm impressed by programs written in general languages daily and for longer than flash has existed.
The worst thing about tech is people who don't know any better get advertised tools that aren't sustainable and aren't suited to the job. If someone sees a flash game and says "WOW! that's so cool I wanna do that", then I don't have problem with it. But if people want to learn a language and are handed an SRS app, or want to make a unique game and are told to use an engine that's when it becomes harmful (and in many cases viral due to network effects)
I gotta admit I don't really know what you're talking about.
I think Flash was fun to develop in. It was easy and fun to write a game in it and it was something a lot more approachable and easier to distribute than trying to cobble together something with OpenGL or DirectX.
Also, I think a lot of the games on Flash actually are fun. I played through Mystery of Time and Space a few months ago and it still holds up. The puzzles are clever, the jokes are funny, the art is likeable, it's a good game.
But what I liked about Flash was that, because it was so approachable, there was a lot of creativity to stuff. A lot of the games weren't good in any kind of "objective" sense, but there was at least a distinct lack of cynicism with a lot of them. The people who made the games weren't doing it for money, they were doing it because they thought it would be cool to make a game. Some games, like Pico's School for example, were unlike basically anything that had come before it. Is Pico's School a masterpiece of game design? Nah, but it's certainly unique, and it was something that could be played on pretty much anyone's computer.
By wisemang 2026-03-052:56 Totally. I remember a thing where there were four horses that each had an a capella part and you could click each horse to bring that part in or silence it. They all harmonized together and the silly little animations for each was a nice touch. I want to say circa 2005.
[edit] well that wasn't hard to find: https://www.numuki.com/game/singing-horses/
Anyways yes the security was abysmal but I’m sure it enabled creativity that wouldn’t have surfaced otherwise.
By Nekorosu 2026-03-058:51 That's absurd.
By ajkjk 2026-03-057:12 a "scam"? really? I don't think there's one person who used flash and felt scammed somehow.
