From Homestar Runner to Salad fingers to badgers, stick figure battles, and the End of Ze World, this — dare I call it an artform? — was a cultural touchstone for a generation.
Flash made vector animation available to the masses, and internet distribution of the relatively small video files was a piece of cake. With the filetype now essentially deprecated, the creators gone on to bigger and better things, the distribution sites shut down, it is a dead form. Most of it will be lost forever, although there may be someone archiving some of it for posterity.
We as a society should be madder about this
I remember some great flash games I used to play, and I know they are lost media now. But there are people archiving tons of flash stuff at “Flashpoint Archive”
They’re not lost, most of them are archived via Flashpoint. The most notable ones have also been exported as regular videos on sites like Newgrounds. But yeah, I miss that Flash era where people made fun animations and games for whatever was on their mind.
The thing I find that is lost is the blurring of the line between video game and animation. Homestar Runner cartoons were often interactive, they made several outright games but also the things that were closer to animations often had easter eggs in them, from (in Strong Bad’s words) dumb stuff that would pop up to entire extra scenes.
Early Youtube had a thriving animation community, but given the limitations of video-based content they really couldn’t do those interactive elements, then Flash died, and now that culture is basically gone.
Homestar Runner cartoons were often interactive
I got fond memories of hunting for the clickies at the end of the videos.
And, usually, throughout.
Fortunately, you can still do almost all of them.
For creators that were still active some jumped ship to pre rendered videos, for example Salad Fingers lives on here:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9383CC2C6DBD902F
A major archival project for the whole flash era is Flashpoint Archive (formally known as BlueMaxima):
People jumped ship to prerendered videos even before the death or Flash, using Flash as the video player.
It’s been over a decade since I learned this, but if I recall correctly, SWF animations that were large enough had desync issues with the audio and frames. The solution was to export the animation as an actual video file and play that back.
Is the tech no longer possible? I have a feeling of no current browser support and security issues, but could one just have a private server for hobbyists?
Ruffle is a Rust-based implementation of a SWF player. It’s not 100% compatible, but it has decent AVM1 (ActionScript 1/2) and AVM2 (ActionScript 3) support already.
It also can be compiled to WebAssembly, making it possible to run Flash in the browser again.
I miss Romp.com it was all adult themed videos.
There are in-browser emulators written in JavaScript. Like any old content, I’m more worried about sources going down rather than not being able to run the flash.
The biggest one (also adopted by the wayback machine) is actually written in Rust (compiled to WASM).
Guys, homestarrunner literally works again thanks to something called the Ruffle Project (just from reading the website). Enjoy the vector graphics and Easter eggs again
I use Ruffle on my personal domain to host my college flash web page again. I made the super Mario world map into a web page for an internet gaming group on campus and spent way too much time doing it. I was delighted I could host it again.
A lot of it was lightweight enough that archival sites etc might not have specifically ruled them out, aside from specific efforts to preserve Flash material. There are also modded versions of Flash Player and emulators that can still play SWFs, and FLV remains supported fairly commonly.
hBomberGuy did a long video on Newgrounds! It’s amazing, but I think it might only be on his Patreon.
Salad fingers is still coming put with new ones lol
I’ve spent a lot of time looking for old stuff from Stick Figure Death Theatre to no avail. It really is quite sad.
We have emulators for it, dude.
Hey, the badger is still alive and badgering!
So is Homestarrunner. Most of their flash stuff still works, too.
They’re still making videos on YouTube at least once a year too! One of the two brother chaps who created it went on to work on the animated show Gravity Falls too.
They both also worked on Yo Gabba Gabba, though one (Matt) has definitely appeared to do a lot more writing/production work (and a good bit of voice work)
Many of the pure animations were done on newgro and they still work.
But the games and interactive videos don’t work anymore. 🤔 I wonder what that means for animations that had a loading screen (even i made one of those, back in the day)
