Adobe Flash is a living dead. Discriminated by browsers, penalized by Google's algorithms and avoided by webmasters like the plague, Flash is about to breathe its last, in December 2020, when Adobe finally stops updating and distributing it. In its place, HTML5 has come to stay for a good while. The big problem with this generational shift? The preservation of all that cultural heritage, the vanguard of the web.
Adobe Flash was one of the pillars on which the web as you know it was built. From its creation in 1996 until recently, it provided a simple way to insert interactive and dynamic content, among other things, into a web that was static and much more boring than today's. It may have had its many (many) problems, but it reigned for years, surviving where others fell. But that luck is about to run out for the old and beloved Flash, and its life has an expiration date: December 2020, when Adobe will pull the plug and stop distributing the product.
This is a problem. And a very big one, at least as far as cultural preservation is concerned. Years of artistic creations of all kinds could be lost, a large part of the web's culture could become inaccessible forever. Fortunately, for (almost) every problem, the Internet has a solution. And, in the case of Flash games, that solution is called Project Flashpoint.
Project Flashpoint
"Flashpoint" is a video game preservation project for Flash games, which will attempt to catalog and keep safe and playable all games that use that technology. Because that is exactly what matters most: that preserved games can be played in the future. The current distribution of "Project Flashpoint" uses Launchbox to bypass the DRM protections of some of those games (which required being hosted on a particular site, connecting to a server, extra files, etc.).
At the time of writing this article, the "Project Flashpoint" distribution weighs about 34.4GB, containing a catalog of 4000 video games, many of them classics of classics. You can download the games individually from the Archive.org page of "Project Flashpoint", but you will need a Flash player or, why not, Launchbox itself.
This is just the beginning of the collection, the project leaders claim to have 2TB of games from the most important web portals, so we can rest easy about that. Flashpoint works on Windows (7 and up) and Linux. You can download the distribution from the official site. The preservation project also has an Archive.org page and a wiki to stay up to date on updates and the game catalog. Not bad!
Flash games, the beginning of indies
If you haven't been in the right places during the last decade, you might think that Flash games don't deserve a chance like the one "Project Flashpoint" is giving them. But you would be completely wrong. Completely wrong! To give you an idea, the indie scene of the video game industry took its first steps on sites like Newgrounds and, later, Kongregate. It was from those Flash game portals that many of the developers who revolutionized the markets began their journey, monetizing their creations YouTube-style (taking a percentage of advertising) or, better yet, developing games sponsored by other game portals.
In that small microclimate, independent developers found a way to live from their art. Little by little, those developers migrated to other technologies, upon the news that Flash would be deprecated in the future, starting to program in HTML5. When Steam created Greenlight, the migration was massive, and the rest is history. And yes, that is why, by preserving these games, we also preserve an important part of the history of the video game industry.
Official site and download: Project Flashpoint
