Flash: Requiem For a Toolkit

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Andrew Foltz

Andrew Foltz is an engineer and educator by day, and generally a terrible person by night. He also runs a podcast where he talks about video games all the time and spends far too much of his precious free time rambling about things on the internet. He also writes stories from time to time.

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9 Responses

  1. Avatar Jaybird says:

    Ah, Homestar Runner. The fact that most of their entry screens were also soundboards delighted me to no end. (TOO-STORE-CHARAC-EMAIL)

    Joe Cartoon was another one that I remember laughing at. (Erm, I should mention that the humor is crude and I can’t imagine anyone finding it funny in 2020. Or even admitting to having liked it.) “Frog in a Blender” and “Gerbil in a Microwave” let you jump back and forth between the lower power settings and watching the creature taunt you before you, the viewer, finally pressed “10” at which point you got a short animation and the interactive media ended.

    It’s available on youtube now but you just watch the buttons count up from 1-10 and removing the interactivity removes more than half of the joke.

    And Popcap, of course. Sweet, sweet Popcap.Report

  2. Avatar LeeEsq says:

    All those illegal streaming sites are going to need another method now.Report

  3. Avatar Oscar Gordon says:

    I’m amazed it’s lasted this long. Hell, if it hadn’t been for security bugs…Report

  4. Avatar Pinky says:

    I want a requiem for the billions of man-hours that should have been spent on office work (but probably would have been spent on Youtube and Facebook).Report

  5. Avatar Carl Schwent says:

    Oh noes! Will I not be able to play my favorite – WhiteChristmas.swf? It’s an animation of Santa and a reindeer chorus doing the Drifters version of White Christmas (Rudolf does the falsetto part, well no red nose but I suppose that’s because of trademarks).
    I tried it just now and Firefox made me override security since I didn’t have the latest version of Flash. Should I upgrade one last time?
    It’s on YouTube, but the best version I found still didn’t have the resolution or sound quality of the original.Report

  6. Avatar Michael Cain says:

    Why do I have the feeling that if Adobe would just open the IP, within 18 months there would be an open-source engine that would play 90% of the Flash content, absent the security bugs?Report

  7. Avatar North says:

    I still mourn for Orisinal
    https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/
    It was such a whimsical site of beautiful simple little games with incredible little music and, reputedly, was very well protected from hackers who kept trying to steal the creators games.Report

  1. August 4, 2020

    […] a bit late but I did write a new article over on Ordinary Times, this time about the death of Flash and discussing a few sites that are worth […]Report