After Flash Died, Volunteers Rebuilt It From Scratch
Adobe ended Flash Player at the close of 2020, and an estimated four million animations and games went dark with it. One volunteer archive and one open-source emulator are why most are still playable.
Adobe announced in July 2017 that it would end Flash Player, and followed through on December 31, 2020, pulling distribution and updates for a plug-in that had, at its peak in the late 2000s, been installed on roughly 99 percent of internet-connected desktops. For a generation of browser games, that was not a slow fade. It was a deadline, and most publishers of Flash-era portals did nothing to meet it; sites simply stopped loading their own content.
The response came from outside any company. Flashpoint, a preservation project started by a volunteer known online as BlueMaxima and now maintained by hundreds of contributors, had already been scraping defunct Flash portals, pulling SWF files out of Wayback Machine snapshots, and reviving old CD-ROM discs and abandoned hosting accounts before the Flash shutdown even hit. By now the project holds more than 190,000 playable Flash games and animations, plus tens of thousands of related assets, distributed either as a roughly 1.5-terabyte full archive or as a smaller “Infinity” edition that streams individual pieces on demand rather than downloading everything up front.
Playing that archive on a modern, Flash-less browser is its own problem, and the solution there is Ruffle: an open-source Flash Player reimplementation written in Rust that runs natively in the browser, no plug-in required. Ruffle’s own developers describe its support as covering a growing majority of older ActionScript 1 and 2 content cleanly, with the more complex ActionScript 3, used by later and more technically ambitious Flash games, still a work in progress. Where Ruffle can’t yet render something correctly, Flashpoint falls back to a sandboxed copy of the original Adobe runtime.
The Internet Archive has run a parallel, more modest effort along the same lines, posting in November 2020 that browser-playable Flash animations and games would keep working through its own site using emulation rather than the dead plug-in. Between the two efforts, the practical result is that the end of Flash turned out to be the end of a delivery mechanism, not the end of the work built on top of it, which is close to the best-case outcome preservation advocates point to when they argue a format’s death doesn’t have to mean its content’s death.