#0012: A personal perspective on the end of the Adobe Flash era
What is Flash?
Adobe Flash is a multimedia software platform. However the term “Flash” is used as a catch all term for any software that utilizes this platform to output media. The Flash technology allowed webpages to host media on them in the form of embedded files; encoded into either the Flash Video (.FLV) or Shockwave Flash (.SWF) format. In order to run these media files, one required the use of a web browser plugin called the “Adobe Flash Player”.
Flash first became prevalent in the late 90’s, early 2000’s as an evolution on the static webpages of the time. Where it was basically used for every animated media webpage element (barring animated .gif images). Including (but not limited to) delivering: video, music, and animated advertisements (e.g. banner ads with audio). It also allowed for interactive media, namely internet browser games. It did this by allowing the browser media access to user’s system inputs (e.g. keyboard and mouse).
In essence if you browsed the internet during this time and interacted with web media. Be it watching a video, playing a game, listening to music, or watching text scroll on a fancy ad. Chances are good that it was delivered to you using the Adobe Flash web player. It can not be understated, that Flash was ubiquitous in it’s time.
The decline of Adobe Flash
Ever since Adobe’s 2017 announcement of the official retirement of their Flash technology platform, for the close of the year 2020; the internet has been abuzz with people both decrying and celebrating the end of the Flash era. Even within the years leading up to Adobe’s 2017 announcement, I have seen Flash’s relevance steadily drop off as the emergence of alternatives such as HTML5, ate up Flash’s market-share.
There are number of reasons as to why people migrated from using Adobe’s Flash player to HTML5 for delivering webpage media. Predominantly, this is because of the public’s perception of the Flash web player having numerous security issues. Whether this is true or not, or simply exaggerated; I can not much comment. What I do know as a former Flash game dev is that you can make whatever network calls you want, as well as access the user’s local system; in order to get at anything from keystrokes to cookies. Then wrap up that code into a fairly innocuous looking .swf file, and embed it into a webpage. Hmmm… I guess it did have security issues. But having said that I am not going to pretend to be in the know, when it come to network security of the 2010’s and Flash. I only used it to make browser games. The network calls to allow online game saves, the cookies for local game saves, and keystrokes for user input.
Flash’s security issues in my opinion were compounded by it’s proprietary and closed source nature. There wasn’t an easy way to check what that embedded .swf file was going to do until it did it. Consequently it made malicious code very difficult to find. HTML5 on the other hand doesn’t suffer from this issue, since it is largely open source. Although most developers these days use APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) or frameworks, such as AngularJS or JQuery to make sites, or Phaser to make games. I.e. they don’t code them from scratch; the code for these tools however is there and public facing if you are inclined to look.
The openness of using HTML5 (Javascript, CSS) based technology means that it is inherently safer than Flash. Since the browser acts as an interpreter for the source code, rather than just a medium for embedded compiled binaries (.swf files) where code can hide. I don’t generally like speaking in absolutes, because there are undoubtedly exceptions to this. However in a general sense this is the case when it comes to Flash and HTML5.
Additionally Flash had another issue and that was it’s lack of support for mobile devices; as it was designed for the prevalent desktop platform at the time (~2008). This was in my opinion the death knell for Flash, as the explosion in popularity that internet capable mobile devices had between then and now (2020); just meant that Flash’s market-share essentially shrank proportionally to this.
Steve Jobs (CEO) of Apple published in 2010 an open letter called “thoughts on Flash”, where he cites a number of reasons as to why his company does not use the Flash technology in their products. Namely their iPhones and iPads of the time. His reasons included: Flash’s security issues, it’s closed source nature, it’s lack of optimisation for touch interfaces, it’s negative affect on battery life, and more. Link below for the full article.
hyperlink: #0011: Copy-paste of “Thoughts on Flash” by Steve Jobs (2010)
Considering what the Apple CEO thought of Flash, it was no surprise that Apple was the first company that outright disallowed Flash from their platform (iOS). This meant that at the time, Flash was only supported on Android devices; and even that dropped off in the later years since the issues that Jobs cited weren’t addressed to a satisfactory degree. In hindsight, it appears as Apple’s dismissal of Flash was a canary in a coal mine. A prelude to it’s collapse in general.
I should mention that I am not really here to talk about Flash’s history. I am not a Flash scholar, nor am I interested enough in it to become one. So take what I have said with a pinch of salt. If that is what you are looking for, there are better sources for that content. I suggest starting with Adobe’s official blog, then the wikipedia.org articles, then follow their sources and read those — as well as random blog posts by internet weirdos like this one — they are always fun. What I am here to do is to talk about Flash as it relates to my experience as a game developer. The games that got me interested in it, and the games that got me out.
About me
A bit of background about me. I attended school up until the mid 2010’s, and grew up (when compared to my working class peers) relatively poor. I.e. no home internet and I had to play outside alot. Gasp! I’ll keep it vague because this is isn’t really about me, however the information is relevant. My first experience with the internet in general was in the mid 2000’s. Where it was largely a utilitarian space as far as I was concerned. This is because I never had the time to explore it at my leisure. My access was always in a public place. Ergo monitored, censored, and timed. Either at school in ICT (Information Computer Technology) class using the “Yahooligans” search engine (remember that?), or at the local library with that creepy moustachioed librarian woman breathing down my neck. Occasionally I could even be found at an internet cafe paying £1 for an hour of uncensored access whilst some indian dude watched what I did from his master console. Hi Mr Singh!
Consequently, my use of the internet was always objective or mission based. I went in not to explore and learn, but with an objective. Especially when I was paying for the privilege (and it is a privilege). I remember being at the internet cafe and booting up my collection of anime sites that allowed downloads (RIP cyber12.net) to get the latest 360p Horrible Subs copy of the Bleach or Naruto episodes, that just aired the previous week in Japan. I recall cramming as many of those ~50MB episodes (.RMVB video format), as well as Final Fantasy wallpapers, low quality D12 or Linkin park MP3s, and “kawaii ecchi” jpegs into a 256MB thumb-drive that I got second-hand from me mum. I would then take this bullshit home to my HP Pavilion A320N in order to fill it’s massive 50GB 3.5′ IDE hard drive, for my repeated media enjoyment. Life was simple back then.
So, what was I doing while the media files downloaded at a blazing 120KiB per second download speed? Well, I was playing Flash games of course! Keep up. I remember each episode download taking roughly half an hour, although I don’t know if the speed and file size numbers that I gave match up… probably not. The fact that I still (mostly) remember these numbers a decade later should tell you how much of an impression the experience left on my young supple mind.
Anyway, While the files downloaded, I’d hit up game sites. Websites, like: Newgrounds, Miniclip, Armourgames, and of course Kongregate. The usual suspects. What games did I play? Games like “Rebuild”, “Epic Battle Fantasy”, “Bubble Tank”, “Sonny”, “Armed with Wings”, or puzzle games like the “Escape the room” series; as well as the clones upon clones of GBA (GameBoy Advanced) tactical games like: “Final Fantasy tactics” and “Advance Wars”. Additionally I played excellent point-and-click titles such as the “Reincarnation” series, or Clickshake’s “Ballad of Reemus” series, or Zeebarf’s “A small Favour” series. These same quirky point-and-click puzzle-adventure games inspired me to create my own.
Why? Well because up until then I had only played MS-DOS point-and-click games. Like Sierra’s various “-Quest” series games. Think: “Police Quest”, “Space Quest”, “King’s Quest”, etcetera-quest. Additionally I played “Simon the Sorcerer” 1 and 2, “Sam & Max: Hit the Road”, and of course “Leisure suit Larry”. As an aside, I never played the famous Lucas Arts games like “Monkey Island” and “Day of the tentacle” until I was an adult. I am a victim ;_;.
Although the MS-DOS games sparked the love of the point-and-click adventure genre, their Flash counterparts brought the realisation home that I actually could do it too. They were fun, they had the heart of the older DOS games, but the technology was much more accessible, and they were significantly shorter. As far as I knew MS-DOS games were made using ritual possession via offerings to the Omnissiah. It was hard enough to install them and get them working properly, let alone make the bloody things. The learning curve involved was just far too sheer for my young self to effectively engage.
Whereas Flash used ActionScript3, and an IDE: named Adobe CS3. Heh, even rhymed. Sort of. ActionScript3 was as friendly as abstract programming languages come, and there were a plethora of online tutorials, both in the form of textual articles as well as youtube and dailymotion videos. This abundance of guides and media motivated me to “‘ave-arr-go!” as they say.
Developing Flash games
Developer resources for Flash media were abundant at the time. My favourite of which, is the open-source IDE (Integrated Development Environment) Flashdevelop! This was my IDE of choice because: 1) I couldn’t afford an official copy of Adobe Flash Professional (or Adobe Animate as they call it now), and 2) I didn’t trust the “unofficial” versions that I found. So FlashDevelop became my de facto IDE of choice and the open-source Flex SDK (Software Development Kit) as my .swf complier of choice. I should mention that this was also my first practical interaction with community driven open software, and it really opened my eyes to the liberation that it offered.
That is, not being tied to any particular company for one’s productivity tools. No cloud subscriptions, no periodic reminders to renew the lease, no “””anonymous””” telemetry phoning home… It’s actually a rather dangerous thing to get accustomed to, because it spoils a person when you realise how shit a lot of proprietary applications become with this bloat. I mean I understand why a lot of it is there, it’s just a shame that it punishes (inconveniences) the paying customer and not the pirate. Who’s most likely running a cracked version (in a virtual machine) without the bloatware. It’s all academic though, because I couldn’t afford it anyway. So it didn’t really matter what I thought about it at the time (or even now really).
The main disadvantage I recall Flashdevelop having when compared to Adobe Flash CS(-whatever), is that Adobe Flash had an animation timeline that it centrally used. This timeline was designed to have various Class objects attached to it at various points or frames. In AS3 an object class is used to encapsulate an entire source file in general. With regards to games: the online tutorials would attach a LoadingScreen.as3 Class to frame 0, then the MainMenu.as3 Class to frame 1, and so on. It does this without necessitating verbose instructions to the program as to how to handle them, as this was done automatically using the timeline. The idea is that when one frame terminated, an automatic call would be made to move to the next frame, and then run the attached classes and the methods contained within.
FlashDevelop on the other hand had far less visually accessible components (like the various art tools or timeline) when compared to the Adobe Flash IDE; and consequently it was less user friendly. At least initially. However once the learning curve was surmounted, it proved to be a very robust IDE. One thing that didn’t help young me, is the fact that the vast majority of the online tutorials were create specifically using the Adobe IDE; and unwittingly used features only present within that IDE — such as the aforementioned timeline.
For example: it took me quite a while to learn the correct techniques to create a functioning loading screen in FlashDevelop because of this. There was a lot of chopping up of other people’s code, then trail and error to get it working. And once it worked, to then to try to understand why in order to reliably replicate the method in future projects.
I remember managing source files in the FlashDevelop IDE being similar to the C++ IDEs I used at the time. (CodeBlocks, Eclipse, Bloodshed Dev-C++.) For example, having to first manually import other code files in order to make calls to their functions or add their objects to the stage. This is in contrast to the Adobe IDE which glossed over much of this type of stuff by using the timeline and a drag-and-drop interface. Where Users would drag an image onto the stage and then click on it to open a box where they’d add in any additional code. The Adobe IDE seemed like an interface designed for animators first and for most. That’s because it was. Whereas FlashDevelop was more of a programmers IDE. Where a lot of the animation tools of the Flash IDE were absent.
I realise that this is more a criticism of me rather than FlashDevelop, however Speaking of FlashDevelop and inconveniences. I do not miss the tedium of manually embedding large volumes of images with this IDE. Then casting them as “bitmaps”, to then place them into individual “movieclip” containers. All with mandatory unique names, by the way. This, in order to allow manipulation of the asset when it was finally added to the stage. At which point I had to manually assign their dimensions (width, height), alpha (transparency), and initial stage (x,y) location. To then use an external tweening library (forgot it’s name) for actually animating these images. Think sliding alpha gradients for flickering lasers, and gradual increase/decrease of an X position variable to make sliding doors open/close. Doing this for every image in a game got laborious quickly, and if I had to do it again I actually would have created helper functions to do it for me. Young me laboriously hard coded it all, and consequently learned good lessons.
Lessons on the difference between working hard and working smart. In this case, on making the time to create utilitarian recyclable functions. Ones that can take the various image’s stats as arguments and return what I wish. The strength of them is their recycle-ability, which leads to cleaner code and the avoidance of long lines of repeated hard-code. It would be instead just one line for each new image: citing the function call and the specific image’s stats as arguments for that function. But I guess a lesson learned the hard way is a lesson learned forever.
Developer migration
It seems like around 2011-2013 was the time when the Flash exodus really begun. Known creators begun to either drop off or change to other things. Around here in my opinion is also when the golden age of Newgrounds effectively ended. You can see from the example of popular Flash animators of the time (Zone and Tiarawhy), how their content either dropped off and/or changed significantly in a bid to reinvent themselves.
I remember when it came time to move on from the Adobe Flash player and browser games in general. I tried out Adobe Air because like many developers who started out with Flash games, I wished to pivot to creating games for other platforms. For me it was the desktop. I wanted to make “proper” point-and-click games, and hopefully earn a buck or two doing it.
Even back then the public perception of Flash games, was as a means of getting a developer’s feet wet in making games and little more. Sooner or later if the person is serious about making games — and serious about making a living, making games; then they have to move on to another platform. Many migrated to making mobile games for iOS and Android. Even in cases where the developer’s still wanted to make browser games, there were better (more lucrative and future-proof) technologies/paths to that.
I have seen many developers move on to using the emergent Unity technology during this transitory period. Unity allowed the creation of multiplatform programs whilst still using the same core codebase; just exporting it into different media formats appropriate to their target platforms. This includes desktops (Windows, Macintosh, and Linux), mobile platforms (Android, iOS), and in this case even web browsers by using the Unity Web Player. At the time I opted to stick with my current tooling, because the idea of being “set-back” by having to learn another system (Unity and C#) would stifle my ability to actually finish games. Its only with time that I have understood that a person never stops being the student. In order to progress optimally in any discipline one should not shy away from learning new things when the opportunity makes itself apparent. If I did keep up with making games, I would have had to retool anyway. Better to eat crow while it’s still young and tender.
Unity Web Player example game: https://www.kongregate.com/games/mythicowl/hexologic
(Notice how it still works post 2020 — assuming Kong is still online.)
I believe my first introductions to the Adobe Air technology was via two games in particular. Edmund McMillen’s original “The Binding of Isaac” and Jasper Byrne’s “Lone Survivor”. Although other devs followed a similar path like Amanita Design and their game “Machinarium”. But the prior two are the one’s I had hands on experience with. Anyway, once I purchased a copy their games, I found the core .swf files in their source folder and a native executable that called them. Along with a bunch of Adobe Air library files. I remember that the .swf files could also be played using a local version of Flash player; bypassing the native executable in the process. Meaning that Adobe Air itself, as I understand it just wraps the .swf file with an .exe.
So in an attempt to ape them, I downloaded the Air SDK and used it. It wasn’t hard to import Air into FlashDevelop and create a desktop app using it. I recall there being minimal code alterations in the process. I should state that I did so initially as an experiment, but I will do so again and host the .zip archives on this site once/if I can find my source files again. For posterity, and as a means of providing anyone interested with a playable copy of my early games.
Closing statements
That’s all I really have to say when it comes to Flash. I loved the games I played as a child. They introduced me to many new genres of games. From Zombie shooters, to puzzle games. Consequently I have a lot of good memories with it. I never really cared or noticed when websites stopped using Flash for banner adverts or for delivering videos (like youtube.com), as it really didn’t matter to me. I did however notice, when Unity web player, Java web player, and HTML5 games slowly started to become more and more prevalent; or when Flash animation died. And for good reason.
Flash is very limited. I remember the frustrating media file size embed limits. Well, you might say that I should’ve just used a loader class to load in external media as needed, but that had it’s own associated issues. Such as the program not finding the files (once online) that you uploaded with it. And some sites at the time would only allow one file upload (the .swf file) with no supporting media files. Where others had a size limit for the actual .swf file itself. I remember having to strip out a lot of embedded music (.mp3) out of my game “Last Life: The Blue Key” because kongregate had a .swf file size limit.
For many reasons like this, Flash got over taken by it’s competitors in it’s space. Then for other reasons (think Steam games sales, Apple iOS games, and plummeting ad revenue), the market for browser games in general fell off. Making it a space largely for new developers to cut their teeth and little else. Now, I don’t think it’s even that.
That makes me wonder; what will happen to all these browser game sites like Newgrounds and Kongregate. Although they host games using various technologies; their decade plus backlog of games is going to be in the Flash format. Their games catalogue is going to get gutted. And I don’t think that many (if any) developers are actually going to back to a game they made (probably as a kid) 10 years ago and remake it for an unprofitable platform. I know I am not. I have moved on from games in general, and even if I got back into it (which I want to), I’d work on a new property. I’d honestly be surprised if these sites still exist in a couple of years because of this.
Still it’s not all doom and gloom. Although Kongregate seems content to let their Flash content die on the vine, Newgrounds created a custom Flash player just for this reason. Although it seems like a bit of a patchwork or stopgap measure. It is much better than nothing.
Anyway, the good Flash games, the one’s people loved from this era. They’ll be preserved. The online copies can be stripped from the web browser (while they are there). Saved, and played locally using a desktop version of Flash player. And for the one’s people didn’t care to preserve. Well, like so much else in life: they get lost to the sands of time.
Thank you for reading.
One more thing…
References, links, further reading
https://web.archive.org/web/20171202123704/https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-update/
https://www.cnet.com/products/hp-pavilion-a320n-athlon-xp-2800-plus-2-08-ghz-monitor-none-series/
https://www.flashdevelop.org/
https://blog.adobe.com/en/2019/05/30/the-future-of-adobe-air.html#gs.na44sx
https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash-player.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashDevelop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Flex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMVB
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_McMillen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML5_and_Flash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5
intro to tweeining:
https://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=20965
example of Adobe IDE specific tutorials:
https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/shape-tweening.html
“Thoughts on Flash” by Steve Jobs
Primary Source: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Secondary Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/04/29/apples_steve_jobs_publishes_public_thoughts_on_flash_letter
Secondary Source: https://medium.com/riow/thoughts-on-flash-1d1c8588fe07
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#%22Thoughts_on_Flash%22