Flash Gaming and Resource Page

The death of Flash Player was a hot topic in the press. Internet users everywhere mourned the loss of their favorites from Coolmath Games and Miniclip, while others snickered as if to say, "told you so." Though I maintain this is largely overblown, just as all the discontinuations before it; what one company says can't stop a ubiquitous piece of software from being preserved and enjoyed into the future.

Most people had a love-hate relationship with Flash, and for fair reason: the frequent crop of security issues, additional processor overhead (which was, somewhat ironically, not as bad as YouTube's HTML5 player), lack of mobile support and being a mandatory requirement even to navigate some sites. Even so, its impact for amateurs and professionals is profound. Although Adobe and web vendors no longer support it, actively trying to wipe it out, that does not mean the history has to go away with it.

Indeed, not even Adobe's timebombs and Windows Update removals can truly extinguish Flash. There are ways you can still enjoy content made with it at home!

(no warranties provided for this page)

Getting Flash games to work

• Flashpoint Infinity
  • Flashpoint is a massive collection of archived games and animations across Flash, PopCap, Java, Unity, and several other plugin-based platforms.
  • This is definitely the easiest option if you don't want to jump through any hoops. Just grab Infinity, extract it into a new folder, and run the Start Flashpoint shortcut. Then you can browse around or search for the game you'd like to play. It includes the projectors and stuff you need to get going.
  • Another option, Flashpoint Ultimate exists with a 478GB download size as of writing, though this is not necessary to use the program. Infinity will download the content the first time you play it.
• A Flash-enabled browser
  • Use this for sites that require Flash like Sploder and Neopets' classic gamesroom.
  • You can find a portable copy of Basilisk preloaded with the Flash plugin on archive.org.
    • The Flash plugin included has had the Adobe timebomb patched out so it will not refuse to run.
    • You do not need to install the browser, or Flash, for it to work.
    • (Basilisk is forked off of Firefox and maintained by the same people behind Pale Moon. This copy is not affiliated with them and was uploaded by maichiu for the convenience of others.)
• A Flash projector
  • Works for SWFs, available for many different versions of Flash.
  • Use this if you have a specific SWF you would like to play natively.
  • You can still find projectors in the debug downloads from Adobe's website.
  • Flashpoint includes these.
• Contemporary emulation
  • Use these if you are a webmaster upkeeping a fancy modern^tm site.
  • These will not run as smoothly as native Flash.
  • Ruffle: WebAssembly based, built in the Rust language.
    • You can use your own SWF on the demo page.
    • Try it on the Sonic Blox Newgrounds page.
  • There are others, but I'm not familiar with them.
• Newgrounds Player/Habboon Desktop App
  • These sites have devised their own solutions. They work with a built-in projector.
• Selling out:

  Commercial support options available

  For enterprise customers that need help transitioning their Flash content to other supported technologies or require Flash Player licensing support after the EOL Date, please contact our official distribution licensing partner, HARMAN, for more information about their commercial support offerings. 

  HARMAN is the official enterprise distributor for Flash Player and enterprises should contact Harman to discuss Flash Player support and Flash Player security updates after the EOL Date. HARMAN has a long-standing history as a Flash partner, maintains knowledge of the Flash Player platform and ecosystem, and is well-positioned to help enterprises through this transition given more than a decade of experience.  

  Potential services provided by HARMAN may include, but are not limited to:

  • Transitioning Flash content to alternate technologies.
  • Creating custom downloadable applications that will load specified Flash content for end user distribution.
  • Providing updated Flash Player installers that will allow Flash to run with compatible browsers in an internal environment. 

Flash games I have enjoyed

This is not an exhaustive list.

Sonic Blox

This is one of those games I played a lot through the Arcade mod for Simple Machines Forum, a PHP script that pretty much got me into web stuff as a kid. (I used to make many web forums no one but mayhaps a couple schoolfriends joined.)

It is a Sonic-themed Tetris clone. There is no holding, but a 2x2 ▟ _| shaped tetromino is added, Dr. Robotnik floats around on occasion to break one of your blocks (which sometimes hurts, sometimes helps) and combos trigger Sonic, Tails or Knuckles to drop down and break blocks, while allowing you to control direction to an extent and each having their own kinda gimmick (Knuckles falls through them, Sonic jumps between blocks, Tails, idk, floats). It adds some nice flavor to it.

Dune Buggy and Snow Line

I'm dropping both here in the same recommendation because they're basically my childhood Miniclip games aside from the well-known Papa's -eria series of games (which are quite excellent). Both of these were developed by IriySoft.

William and Sly

This was one of Caby's recommendations a while back. It's a pretty game with fluid animation and pleasant music.

Block Miner

This is a bit of a funny case. Block Miner was a 2D Minecraft "clone" of sorts, also sort of like Everybody Edits in the sense you can create a world, mine blocks and build things with other people. I thought I was the only one who remembered it, but just recently a private server for the game called Miner Moles came about as people got tired of waiting for the new owner who bought the domain and original assets to bring the game back someway. It uses the original client swf with patches and quality of life improvements played in a Flash projector.