- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
[On a super serious note, Adobe Flash was discontinued in 2020. If you’re getting a notification to update/install Flash on any website, that’s a virus. Don’t do it.]
[This XKCD strip was published on October 3, 2008 ]
You know ‘em, you love ‘em, you miss ‘em. Newgrounds, Miniclips, Shockwave, Kongregate, Neopets, we did whatever we could to evade school and office firewalls with VPNs, finding the latest games and playing ‘em before they got blocked in an endless game of cat and mouse with IT shutting down a distinct lack of productivity.[This XKCD strip was published on October 3, 2008 ]
Take a trip down memory lane; what are the games you remember from the 90s and 2000s? Do you remember the title, or even a few screenshots or gameplay? Are the games archived anywhere that you can find a link to play them? Is the music still stuck in your head years later? Did you just now find out that some of these people who made addictive flash games are now established game developers on consoles today? Hopefully they stand the test of time and your high scores remain undefeated!
Getting Over It (2017)
I’ll be honest, I never did play this one myself, but I think I recall seeing it here and there when it first launched. This video I found is surprisingly in-depth and offers a deep dive on the speedrunning community that’s apparently been thriving even after pop culture has moved on.
Agari.io (2015)
The most recent flash game I remember stumbling upon, and I think it’s about the time freeware games started to drop off in popularity. You start off as a small, gelatinous ball, and you use your mouse to move around collecting other tiny balls to make yourself bigger. Watch out though, other online players were playing for longer than you and are now trying to eat you! Hide in spiky viruses, but be careful when you get too big as those viruses can make your ball burst into smaller bubbles that can be easily captured by bigger players.
Robot Unicorn Attack (2010)
The song is now stuck in your head. It will not leave until you watch the above video.
Transformice (2010)
THE ANVIL GOD HUNGERS
Canabalt (2009)
Supposedly this is the original endless runner, the game that spawned the genre. It had the slightest bit of story about a robot/alien invasion going on if you can watch the background without getting distracted too long that you fall to your death. I have fond memories getting hooked on this around the time I first played Mirror’s Edge; obviously they have very distinct game play but the stylisation going on almost seem complementary to each other.
Tuper Tario Tros. (2009)
This one holds a special place in my heart; in first year university I met my best friend because at first I was showing it off to a cute girl I had a slight crush on who also liked video games, and sure enough he got interested in what we were doing on my laptop, we started talking about games and she kinda left us both from the student lounge for our bromance to kindle. But enough about my waxing nostalgia, this game itself was so tight in how it was developed that despite only having one level, it could be replayed over and over again. The production quality feels like something Nintendo would have done, should have done, for the NES Remix games on Wii U.
[side note: where the hell are the NES Remix games on Switch?]
Don’t Shit Your Pants (2009)
This survival horror game is very simplistic, and this video pretty much demonstrates all the achievements, but fuck if it still doesn’t make me giggle with every possible variation of shitting/not shitting your pants.
QWOP (2008)
It’s so easy, look Don’t you want to give it another shot after watching this?
Impossible Quiz (2007)
(TW: Romani slur at 4:38)
Why yes, the passage of time is cruel and unrelating. This Markiplier video is ten years old as of this past March, and yeah the answers are as infuriating as ever.
Super Smash Flash (2006-2022)
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I'm almost positive that an incredibly significant majority of registered users on this site have played some variation of Super Smash Flash at least once in their life. Somehow seeing this roster isn’t nearly as wild as what SSBU ultimately became, but damn I want to see Mr. Incredible fight Inuyasha.
…YA KNUCKLES
Heli Attack 2-3 (2003-2005)
This is where I really start to date myself, because this was around grades 6 through 8 for me, and me and my classmates were doing whatever we could to find VPNs that we could discreetly load to get around the school firewall. Whenever the day was rainy, I always intentionally lingered in my classroom on the chance the bell would ring for an indoor recess so I could claim one of the four computers in our classroom to play games for 15 minutes. Sheer bliss.
Waterballoon Drop 3 (2000?)
This was a weird throwback for me trying to find it. I’m still not a hundred percent sure if this was the exact game I remember playing growing up, but the crappy low quality voice clips do sound intimately familiar to me trying to toss water balloons on your average pedestrian walking below (such as police officer, Italian-American, clown, etc).
Elf Bowling (1999)
A needlessly violent game against Santa’s jolly little elves, but somehow this weirdly got a GBA and DS release in 2005 within three days of each other on November 28th and December 1st, respectively. Fart jokes, butt jokes, hitting animals with bowling ball jokes, before the millenium this was about as good as web games got.
Just want to browse the internet archive? Fortunately, there are many repositories of all those old games from yesteryear collected online. It’s not complete, and you may end up looking elsewhere, but these are as good a start as any. Just be mindful that some of these games are born from the less culturally sensitive 90s and 2000s, and may not have exactly aged well. Just something to be mindful of, as I already had to remove Tamale Loco from this list
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash
Flashpoint Archive
A community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.flashpointarchive.org
Just as an FYI
If no one can help you find your game here that you can’t remember, I also recommend visiting r/TipOfMyJoystick and people there should be more than happy to help you with the more information you can provide.
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