Remembering - Macromedia/Adobe Flash

[Pawnless Endgame]

Anyone here with fond memories of Flash? The Flash files were in .SWF, occasionally compiled into an .EXE. The first animation I saw was in 1999, a cartoon of Darth Vader doing a rap. The popularity mushroomed in the early 2000s and a lot of the early internet fads (which we now know are called memes) were in Flash e.g. Badger Badger Badger, All Your Base, What Is Love (by Haddaway), stick figure fights, Weebls and rathergood.com. Then at the annoying end of the scale was Crazy Frog and at the tail end (and still equally annoying) was My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic.

In the late 2000s, Adobe took it off Macromedia and they either revealed an existing flaw in it or they (deliberately) buggered it up, eventually killing it altogether. The plugin for web browsers ended in 2020, but I wasn't just going to delete 1000+ SWF files off my PC. Adobe still had their stand alone player on their site after 2020, so I was still able to play them. There are third party Flash players as well such as Ruffle.

What were your favourite animations? Mine are probably too risqué (PG/13) to post here, but you can look them up:

Regurge Episode 01 - Internet Killed The Video Star
Regurge Episode 02 - Pokee

Lots of Flash classics have been converted / uploaded to YouTube.

Now that it's HTML5, there doesn't seem to be the same sort of culture around it as when it was SWF.

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

Cheers guys, for the positives but also for the negatives. I totally forgot that Flash needed a constant barrage of updates! *removes rose-tinted spectacles*

Indeed some of the games were great, and I did for a brief 2-3 years own an all-in-one PC, where the screen had touch input. The games (and other interactive Flash) worked a treat with touchscreen.