At the end of this year, Adobe are finally ending support for Flash. As much as people are cheering this on (and I don't blame them), I think a lot of people don't realize just how much history will be lost. I don't often do threads, but I'd appreciate if you gave this one a read

So many game devs have their roots making silly little flash games when they were younger. It was the first truly low barrier of entry way to express your creativity and just make something. I know so many professional game devs who started out this way.

Professional animators, too. So many artists, animators, cartoonists, etc got their start in Flash. Anybody could just jump in and make what they wanted. Did you know that a lot of serious shows use what is essentially Flash but rebranded, even today? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_television_series

I honestly think Flash was the golden age for both games and animation. Even with Unity and Unreal and Godot, the barrier of entry of making and sharing games is so much higher today than it was in the heyday of @Newgrounds. Quality is generally higher, perhaps, but it's harder.

There's one cool project which I'd recommend checking out, called Flashpoint - they're trying to preserve the history before it's inaccessible. https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ 

If you want to take a trip down memory lane, give them a looksee.

I'm contributing my own spare time to helping write an open source Flash player, that we hope can safely let existing Flash sites still function. It's been so educational, and it's crazy for me to see how all of these 15 year old games actually functioned. https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, Flash was great. It also sucked, nobody will deny that - but I truly miss the era of zero-barrier creativity and discoverability.

Flash will die this year. Let's remember it fondly. Go play a flash game one more time for old times sake.