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Flash Hall Of Fame
My (short) Experience With Flash
Adobe Flash was first developed in the 90s, and didn't reach its end of support until new years 2020, meaning for pretty much the entire history of the Internet becoming widely used, Adobe flash has always existed as a part of some cultural canon, and a building block for a large part of the World Wide Web. Despite its prevalence, it took me quite a while before I truly got into Flash-made content. Well, of course I had used flash before, particularly in form of flash games, but beyond that I had never sought out flash content or downloaded any flash (.SWF (shock-wave flash)) files.My first experience with Flash dates back to playing Flash games as a kid. I remember, together with my classmates, huddling around computers and scouring through Flash Game sites in school, As well as playing games hosted on a local TV network's website at home. I more distinctly remember first truly getting into Flash content through /f/, and started downloading .swf's around the holiday season of 2020, making it an extra cozy Christmas in my memory. Yes, while i had played some flash games as a wee lad, that does mean I first truly cared about Flash just as it was about to go out of support. In fact, i believe the influx of people reminiscing about it helped peaked my interest. In that regard i am 20 years late but it's evidently never too late to get into Flash content
The oldest .SFW files I can find on my computer date back to November 24th 2020, which sounds about right. The honour of oldest file in my collection I'm certain goes to Loading.sfw, which i downloaded trough SFWchan before or right after finding /f/. Dated a day later to the 25th, there's Party_Moderately.swf, which i distinctly remember as one of the first flash loops I saw. (I could also swear I saw Osaka.sfw on /f/ one of those very early days, but apparently i was too unaware to download it.)
As you'd expect from getting on /f/ over half a decade after its heyday, It wasn't all that active, but it still had enough content to fill out its frontpage with new content twice a day. Sticking with it after the death of Flash, I've personally witnessed it's activity decline, first towards seeing a new page of content once every day, to every other day, and now even less than that.
Never did I actually post on /f/ - I'm only seven years old and wouldn't want to get vanned by 4chan himself! - though standing by watching /f/ slowly die off feels somewhat cruel considering how much I enjoy browsing it. As a sidenote, I do know my friend Cidoku has posted some of his original flash animations on there. I even remember seeing his then new animation Tyllop.sfw on there before I even knew him, making realizing that after meeting him on IRC a fun surprise. When posted it didn't get all that much attention, but I'm certain that anyone who is still dedicated enough to stick to Flash greatly appreciates OC, especially of such high quality.
The Death Of Flash
Oh Adobe, you got Flash to where it was, a pillar of the web. But it grew out of your control, and you had to put down your only child -_- The official explanation as to why Flash went out of official support was... something about security, along with it's growing irrelevance in the face of advancements of HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly.
You can, of course, still view Flash files in a stand alone Flash Player and use Macromedia Flash without issue, but as for viewing Flash content in a web browser, Adobe and modern browsers seem to have been keen on making it impossible. The question still looms if making Flash inaccessible in modern browsers is worth removing easy acces to thousands of original animations and games, dating back over 2 decades. Cutting yourself off from Flash completely is akin to crippling yourself in terms of viewing legacy online content. And unless someone has a shallow enough relationship with the web as to only visit the newest and most popular sites, I see no way in which that constitutes a desirable trade-off.
The Case stands that without preservation efforts I would have no way to revisit any of the Flash games I remember playing so often as a kid. Yes are mostly nothing I would fawn over today, but nostalgia trumps sensibility, and it alone would make me happy to play them again.
After the time-bomb installed in the final version of Adobe Flash Player went off, I continued using Flash for some time by downloading SWF files and playing them locally via the stand alone Flash player. Of course, for anyone wanting to use Flash in your browser today there is the Flash emulator Ruffle, which has improved greatly since I first used it, and deemed it unsuitable for a full on replacement. (Though it may still have trouble playing certaint files) If you're looking for a more accurate experience lolwut has written a guide to get flash player working in browsers once more.
On Short Why I Made This Page
Eventually my interest in Flash started to die off again, leading me to simply sit on my now quite large collection of files. It did not help that after switching operating systems a while back I had apparently been tooThe music sitting at the top of the page is the Chrono Trigger track, Corridors Of Time. Randomly stumbling upon it again lately, my mind immediately jumped to a Flash looped which used it, showing that, clearly, the Flash loops I've now spent years collecting still have a place in my memory. (As Flash's peak relevance came around the 2000s, you'd assume the people who learned to use it would have grown up to be nostalgic for the era of games around Chrono Trigger's release.)
PandoraTrigger.swf