I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it.
In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate interactive elements like minigames, easter eggs, and choose your own adventure stories.
He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.
But in flash animation you can. You can easily let the audience choose a character's hair color and have that effect the animation for the rest of the story.
The author of that YouTube video made me wish I could experience those cartoons and it makes me happy that places like the IA are making that possible.
Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow.
Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping for touch input. Apparently they showed this garbage to Steve Jobs several times and he shot it down, and I can't blame him.
Tragic, really. Even still, today, if Adobe open sourced Flash and Flash CS4 I think it be a huge hit. Homestar Runner and Newgrounds. Such an interesting space for creators. I can't even imagine the things people might create if it was still around today.
> Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe...
I was working as Flash dev for a large company and we used to send support tickets to Adobe, some included weird compiler bugs that could be dodged by exchanging two lines of Actionscript. Adobe didn't respond a single ticket. My theory is that Macromedia's code base was just way too complex to be fixed or ported, and so they started working from scratch on the successor of Flash: Adobe AIR, but took some wrong decisions and never got as popular.
Flash was epic for creative coding, and I haven't seen another software environment come close. We lost a really great onramp to UI development when Flash died.
I suspect there are deep licensing problems with the Flash codebase. For instance, video was such a heavy investment for them towards the end, and I'm sure they licensed plenty of that tech. I wonder how usable it would be if they just open-sourced the parts they owned free-and-clear.
I was running a huge flash-based game site at the time and was able to test it on the dev Android Chrome plugin. The touch mapping was bad but there was clearly a way evolving around it (which worked well within a year for releasing AIR-based mobile games). To satisfy my own curiosity about performance, in 2010 I wrote my own JS/canvas engine[0] that was highly performant given the limitations of the JS engines at the time, and tested their frame rates side by side on the same interactive animations. Flash outperformed, but it ate more battery. I think in the end that was the reason Jobs decided to nix it.
It is tragic, mostly though because the Flash workflow was so great for working with animators and artists as you were refining 2D game assets. Along with the whole Away3D and Starling ecosystems leveraging GPUs it was extremely performant in ways that JS engines still can't quite touch, and there's nothing similar in terms of cross-platform deployment now (pixijs and threejs are both great, but they aren't integrated into a package non-coder designers can work with and you still can't compile them to a single piece of bytecode that runs anywhere).
adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot.
I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby
I thought Flash died, because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits. So yes, Jobs shot it down several times, because Flash would have allowed games and apps outside the direct control of Apple.
Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage.
It was also hard to get a non-app store version of pure HTML/JavaScript on the iPad. With severe restrictions to localstorage.
I just deleted my response about how I didn't think it was so tragic due to the security issues that plagued Flash, but I deleted it because I don't think my point about past security issues cleanly relates to yours about the benefits of open sourcing. I apologize if anyone attempted to respond to my comment and found that it was deleted by the time they submitted - that was not my intent.
> Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage.
Flash ran like garbage on every platform it supported, which is the reason Apple didn't allow it on the iPhone. And the Internet is a better place today because half of it is no longer built on a poorly implemented proprietary technology.
At the time I was a big Android fan, and it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that while my phone and tablet could run flash unlike Apple's products, the experience was so incredibly shitty that it was not worth actually using. I don't think I ever made it through a full episode of South Park on southparkstudios.com without the player crashing and me needing to reload my browser at least once.
It's too bad Flash Lite which quietly was on so many devices didn't have the abilty to upscale either.
At the time iOS came out, there was no App store, let alone a desire to let other runtimes run on iOS directly or indirectly like there are in some parts/ways today with web apps.
At the time when Flash was prematurely ended, there was no suitable replacement for what it could do, and it kind of set of more than a few years of darkness of reinventing the wheel.
Since Flash's ActionScript was based on ECMAscript (which is also familar to the Javascriptians), I don't think Adobe's replacement for FlashBuilder equivalent that rendered in HTML/JS/SVG reached the world, or if it did, timed well, or in any meaningful capacity.
If anyone could create html equivalent tooling for what html could do equivalent to flash, it would have been Adobe.
Few platforms came close to the promise of one codebase on many platforms like Flash. Lots of good hopes on the horizon in WebAssembly, Rust, etc, and more concretely with the next-curve techs like Flutter.
Those were fun gimmicks and all, but Homestar Runner worked because of the cute character designs, funny writing, and Matt's genuinely outstanding voice acting. It holds up just fine on YouTube.
It was more about Flash being a really powerful tool for amateur animators, and coming at a time when you didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet.
Yeah, but there was a reason that we "didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet" at the time — bitmapped videos were far too bandwidth-intensive for most people to download in realtime. (You could still download them, and people sometimes did; but a 3-minute, 240p MPEG1/RealPlayer clip was something you'd need to dedicate a half-hour to fetching, either using a download manager or Limewire. It was not a "click to play" experience.)
This was also the reason that YouTube didn't get started until 2005 — that was about when at least some people were starting to be "ready" to receive streaming bitmapped video over their Internet connections, without needing to make a big production of it.
Flash as a distribution format for video was distinctive and successful because it was essentially a standardized abstract machine for demoscene demos — a Flash animation wasn't a video, it was an ActionScript program that rendered a video when executed. So a Flash animation could be arbitrarily lightweight on the wire — as long as the author was clever about composing things out of vector bits and small reusable textures.
Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway.
Flash as a distribution format for games stuck around a few more years, because HTML5 wasn't fully there to replace it yet. And the authoring tool (now Adobe Animate) is around to this day, because it's still an excellent tool for creating vector-based cartoons... that you render out to bitmapped video.
yeah, lots of Flash games were actually innovative.
plenty of developers got their start on NG with flash before moving on to make console or steam games.
flash had plenty of shovelware, but you can still make incredible stuff with it.
>He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.
Oh, how little credit you give to the magic of editing. If they needed the same footage to be reusable with minor differences in things like hair color, they could do it all in post. With the magic of m3u8 play lists, they could see where they even have the variations of videos to as minimum duplication of video as possible. It becomes much more of an asset management nightmare than content creation issue. As an aside, theatrical releases of movies were sometimes given "fingerprints" where small details in a scene would be changed like the adding/removing of a prop in the background, the color scheme of the books/towels/whatever in the background, etc. They didn't film all of those variations. They were modified in post.
Flash really was something special. We created all kinds of training content in it (all of which was completely replaced with static text and images after all of our customers adopted iPads for doing associate training -
Which where it still is today, extremely boring). We all these animated characters, with their own backstories and personalities, that each had their own professional voice talent. Associates in Asia especially loved them. Another project was for people who repaired printers. All the printers this company produced were 3d models inside of flash that could be rotated on any access and disassembled to the smallest screw. A tech could choose something to repair and it would show them step by step how to do the repair. They could rotate/zoom the printer however they wanted to see the current step playing out. Neither video nor static text/images are a good replacement.
The best thing was, everything was vector graphics, so the file sizes were minuscule.
How accessible was that training content for disabled people, particularly blind people with screen readers? Or was it about tasks that are inherently visual? Plain text is better in some ways.
> He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.
I mean, that's not a distinction of Flash as a format; that's a distinction between animation and film. Netflix could certainly do a CYOA for a cartoon series.
It is not a distinction between animation and film, it is around when the content is generated. A CYOA series needs the content generated in realtime. Each binary decision that impacts basic facts about the series (hair color in this example, or which character has something happen to them, etc) in the entire series doubles the number of possible versions.
You can already experience them on homestarrunner.com thanks to ruffles. It emulates the flash player and the old toons seem to work fine. The site even has it built in so no need for an extension.
The thing I still miss about Flash is the authoring tool.
It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites.
I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t.
I wish Adobe had done a better job with flash and just converted the Flash Player into html5. Surely that could have been done?
Website creation is far too complicated now compared to then and I think the level of experimentation - especially by lone artists - has plummeted since flash died.
It's not just flash, all of web development has become very complex. In the early days, people would learn to make websites because they wanted to be web developers. They could make something in 5 minutes that was reasonably similar to what they would make if they achieved their goal of getting a job doing it. Now, in 5 minutes you can make a squarespace page, which is still impressive, but nowhere near something you could get a job doing. People either do this and give up, or they get lost in a maze of studying (bootstrap vs MUI??? Tailwind vs SASS??????) and emerge a fully-formed web designer (having made no cool personal site along the way).
>Now, in 5 minutes you can make a squarespace page, which is still impressive, but nowhere near something you could get a job doing.
there are tons of ppl who just need an interface that lets them efficiently gather money for their good/service. in that context the squarespace page is all they need.
most ppl STILL can't figure that out and pay someone to do it.
I fondly remember when I first discovered how to attach a goto action to a button and I went nuts with it making choose your own adventure type animations. Drawing was also really easy to make thing look decent even with a mouse. I haven't found (or admittedly looked for) a similar vector drawing tool like that ever since.
Yes, the generated brush strokes were really good. I was at one point just making static comics in Flash, using just a mouse because the brush strokes looked like they were drawn by someone way more skilled than myself.
The creation tool still exists (it's been renamed to Adobe Animate) and even still lets you make interactive content with, I can only assume, a similar workflow. But what I really can't understand or forgive is that Adobe killed ActionScript, replacing it with a JavaScript library (CreateJS) that's similar but not quite the same AIUI. That meant you can't just re-export existing Flash content for HTML5, and Flash creators' existing skillsets aren't directly applicable to the new system…
There's no good technical justification for this. Adobe could have ported Flash Player to WebAssembly or asm.js, or they could have written an ActionScript to JavaScript compiler and a set of support routines. They could have gotten even very complex old Flash projects working on HTML5, they could have charged money for this feature, and many people would have forked out for it! Instead they were content to let their platform die. It makes no sense.
Yes, I still haven't found a good alternative to easily build simple interactive animations for the web. Flash was fun, even with my limited artistic skills.
> Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed
I had trouble when adding e.g. https://archive.org/details/gravityrunner-nolimit because there's literally zero documentation on this system that I could find, but the way that it works is that you edit metadata tags (key-value list) and there is some magic/special tags that have an effect on how the item is displayed on the site, like whether to show you the emulator. What you need to set is:
emulator = ruffle-swf
emulator_ext = swf
You can find out what others have set by clicking on 'show all' at the download options and choosing the <itemname>_meta.xml file.
Well now I've got that crappy music stuck in my head.
That brings up a real mystery from 15 years ago that I never did solve. Back in the day you could go on kongregate or whatever and play these awful flash games that clearly took 30 minutes or less to make. Just junky, copy-paste stuff. (Much worse than the "home run derby" game above.)
And yet...
And yet they all seemed to have original sound tracks of more-or-less passable game music. Where were they getting this from? Did adobe give everybody a huge catalog of tunes to pick from?
a lot of people tended to get CC0 music, free, and didn't need to make their own
though most of the actually good flash games had an artist make music specifically for the game
Newgrounds had the Audio Portal, a repository of free-to-use music specifically intended for use by people creating movies and games for their Flash Portal.
That being said, this sort of licensed tie-in webgame probably would have just bought a royalty-free stock music track from Audiojungle[0] or whatever.
There was also a huge market for licensing custom-branded versions of whole Flash games, too. That's why every mid-2000s official site for any sort of media property had Flash games on it.
A shockingly large amount of music used in old flash games and in old YouTube videos is by Kevin MacLeod, whose released thousands of high quality tracks of all styles under CC-BY.
(For context, there is a video of a YouTuber trying to beat it... and he did, 7 1/2 hours later. He was mostly stuck on the "Christopher Robin" level which basically requires perfect to-the-frame timing.)
Yeah that’s Ludwig. One of the better streams ever. The final boss is crazy because every pitch is random so you have to guess instantly + perfect hit it too
The reviews on the english version archive.org entry are a piece of art, memorial for the victims and something else altogether. Have not seen such reviews on anything else, not even close.
Part of me feel sad that the big players deprecated flash before any good alternatives popped up, HTML5 wasn't exactly an alternative yet.
Flash was waaay more powerful, I think we lost a bit of good technology there.
Particularly for vector-based animated movies, can achieve much higher quality-per-bandwidth than compressed raster graphics, and are future-proofed to automatically handle higher video resolutions.
This part itself is probably a lost art forever. As are many things that required great efficiency. Apart from a few embedded specialties. I feel the same pain though, watching a HomestarRunner video or something by means of a 200MB video when I know the SWFs were like 100KB.
yeah, a lot of flash content that was SVG exclusive can go up past 4k and look stunning, and flash was the only one around then (and debatably, now) with an editor to let someone leverage that
Flash appears to have been a very capable medium for transporting intent, but the intent of that awesomeness was overshadowed by the shoddiness of the underlying implementation. Flash, in its various implementations, has always amounted "building a house upon sand". You don't have to search far to see this. It was an ignorantly thrown together security nightmare (ignorant in the sense that they had no idea how bad it actually was until the RCE's came raining down).
I have many fond memories of Flash. It was far from perfect, but it really brought together programming and art, to a level that I don't see today.
Around 2005(?) I remember a Flash conference in Turin, Italy where I saw many great interactive CDs and games from artists from all around the world.
Tokyoflash, Yugo Nakamura and many more creators that were building experiences which I have a hard time finding these days.
In the latter years, there was FWA (Favourite Website Award) full of great flash websites (still remember GotMilk).
And then came Flex and AIR, that made building "rich internet applications" fun.
I left web development when Flash died and coming back to it now, after almost 20 years, and honestly, I don't think we're any better.
Adobe being Adobe, never got to fix the security and performance of the Flash Player (a dedicated surfer can still find malware disguised as Flash Player).
They certainly were fun days back with Macromedia at the helm. Full suite of tools that worked extremely well together.
I remember when Tim Burton put out various cartoons via Director (the same used for countless DVDs) that opened up more dramatic storytelling than the business “intros” offered at the time (I built these too mind you).
I was even Flash AS3 certified at one point, something I was very proud of in my early career.
Readit News
I never watched the series myself but I do remember hearing about it.
In the video essay he talks about how flash videos like Home Star Runner were a unique medium. Not quite passive like a video but not quite interactive like a video game. The videos could be watched passively but also could incorporate interactive elements like minigames, easter eggs, and choose your own adventure stories.
He points out that even when Netflix dipped into the choose your own adventure format they couldn't achieve the same flexibility as a flash animation because if for example they wanted to make a story change that would dye a character's hair blue they couldn't possibly film all the permutations scenes required to propagate that visual difference throughout the story.
But in flash animation you can. You can easily let the audience choose a character's hair color and have that effect the animation for the rest of the story.
The author of that YouTube video made me wish I could experience those cartoons and it makes me happy that places like the IA are making that possible.
Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping for touch input. Apparently they showed this garbage to Steve Jobs several times and he shot it down, and I can't blame him.
Tragic, really. Even still, today, if Adobe open sourced Flash and Flash CS4 I think it be a huge hit. Homestar Runner and Newgrounds. Such an interesting space for creators. I can't even imagine the things people might create if it was still around today.
I was working as Flash dev for a large company and we used to send support tickets to Adobe, some included weird compiler bugs that could be dodged by exchanging two lines of Actionscript. Adobe didn't respond a single ticket. My theory is that Macromedia's code base was just way too complex to be fixed or ported, and so they started working from scratch on the successor of Flash: Adobe AIR, but took some wrong decisions and never got as popular.
I suspect there are deep licensing problems with the Flash codebase. For instance, video was such a heavy investment for them towards the end, and I'm sure they licensed plenty of that tech. I wonder how usable it would be if they just open-sourced the parts they owned free-and-clear.
It is tragic, mostly though because the Flash workflow was so great for working with animators and artists as you were refining 2D game assets. Along with the whole Away3D and Starling ecosystems leveraging GPUs it was extremely performant in ways that JS engines still can't quite touch, and there's nothing similar in terms of cross-platform deployment now (pixijs and threejs are both great, but they aren't integrated into a package non-coder designers can work with and you still can't compile them to a single piece of bytecode that runs anywhere).
[0] https://strikedisplay.blogspot.com/?m=0
Same way pdf does, because the money was in the authoring tools and they had the best ones around.
But adobe mostly inherited flash because they wanted the death of macromedia, so they didn't really care about it.
I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby
Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage.
It was also hard to get a non-app store version of pure HTML/JavaScript on the iPad. With severe restrictions to localstorage.
Flash ran like garbage on every platform it supported, which is the reason Apple didn't allow it on the iPhone. And the Internet is a better place today because half of it is no longer built on a poorly implemented proprietary technology.
At the time I was a big Android fan, and it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that while my phone and tablet could run flash unlike Apple's products, the experience was so incredibly shitty that it was not worth actually using. I don't think I ever made it through a full episode of South Park on southparkstudios.com without the player crashing and me needing to reload my browser at least once.
At the time iOS came out, there was no App store, let alone a desire to let other runtimes run on iOS directly or indirectly like there are in some parts/ways today with web apps.
At the time when Flash was prematurely ended, there was no suitable replacement for what it could do, and it kind of set of more than a few years of darkness of reinventing the wheel.
Since Flash's ActionScript was based on ECMAscript (which is also familar to the Javascriptians), I don't think Adobe's replacement for FlashBuilder equivalent that rendered in HTML/JS/SVG reached the world, or if it did, timed well, or in any meaningful capacity.
If anyone could create html equivalent tooling for what html could do equivalent to flash, it would have been Adobe.
Few platforms came close to the promise of one codebase on many platforms like Flash. Lots of good hopes on the horizon in WebAssembly, Rust, etc, and more concretely with the next-curve techs like Flutter.
Deleted Comment
It was more about Flash being a really powerful tool for amateur animators, and coming at a time when you didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet.
This was also the reason that YouTube didn't get started until 2005 — that was about when at least some people were starting to be "ready" to receive streaming bitmapped video over their Internet connections, without needing to make a big production of it.
Flash as a distribution format for video was distinctive and successful because it was essentially a standardized abstract machine for demoscene demos — a Flash animation wasn't a video, it was an ActionScript program that rendered a video when executed. So a Flash animation could be arbitrarily lightweight on the wire — as long as the author was clever about composing things out of vector bits and small reusable textures.
Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway.
Flash as a distribution format for games stuck around a few more years, because HTML5 wasn't fully there to replace it yet. And the authoring tool (now Adobe Animate) is around to this day, because it's still an excellent tool for creating vector-based cartoons... that you render out to bitmapped video.
Homestar, Weebl, Salad Fingers, Charlie the Unicorn, Ultimate Showdown, Xiao Xiao, Albino Black Sheep, Newgrounds, YTMND...
It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that Zombo.com parodied) that made Flash suck.
It works! It had been effectively defunct for years:
https://amanita-design.net/thequestfortherest/
Oh, how little credit you give to the magic of editing. If they needed the same footage to be reusable with minor differences in things like hair color, they could do it all in post. With the magic of m3u8 play lists, they could see where they even have the variations of videos to as minimum duplication of video as possible. It becomes much more of an asset management nightmare than content creation issue. As an aside, theatrical releases of movies were sometimes given "fingerprints" where small details in a scene would be changed like the adding/removing of a prop in the background, the color scheme of the books/towels/whatever in the background, etc. They didn't film all of those variations. They were modified in post.
The best thing was, everything was vector graphics, so the file sizes were minuscule.
How accessible was that training content for disabled people, particularly blind people with screen readers? Or was it about tasks that are inherently visual? Plain text is better in some ways.
I mean, that's not a distinction of Flash as a format; that's a distinction between animation and film. Netflix could certainly do a CYOA for a cartoon series.
It is one of the few bits of software that bridged a gap between artists and creators and coding in a way that totally democratised creating interactive websites.
I see some similarities with Instagram filters and TikTok effects. The visual-layout-you-can-add-code-to approach, but Flash was so mainstream and capable in a way filters aren’t.
I wish Adobe had done a better job with flash and just converted the Flash Player into html5. Surely that could have been done?
Website creation is far too complicated now compared to then and I think the level of experimentation - especially by lone artists - has plummeted since flash died.
there are tons of ppl who just need an interface that lets them efficiently gather money for their good/service. in that context the squarespace page is all they need.
most ppl STILL can't figure that out and pay someone to do it.
There's no good technical justification for this. Adobe could have ported Flash Player to WebAssembly or asm.js, or they could have written an ActionScript to JavaScript compiler and a set of support routines. They could have gotten even very complex old Flash projects working on HTML5, they could have charged money for this feature, and many people would have forked out for it! Instead they were content to let their platform die. It makes no sense.
Deleted Comment
[0] https://ruffle.rs/
> Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed
I had trouble when adding e.g. https://archive.org/details/gravityrunner-nolimit because there's literally zero documentation on this system that I could find, but the way that it works is that you edit metadata tags (key-value list) and there is some magic/special tags that have an effect on how the item is displayed on the site, like whether to show you the emulator. What you need to set is:
You can find out what others have set by clicking on 'show all' at the download options and choosing the <itemname>_meta.xml file.https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Uploading_SWFs_for...
https://archive.org/details/homerunderby_en
The japanese version is here (no difference) https://archive.org/details/homerun_20201126
They might crash in full screen though (some kind of bug)
That brings up a real mystery from 15 years ago that I never did solve. Back in the day you could go on kongregate or whatever and play these awful flash games that clearly took 30 minutes or less to make. Just junky, copy-paste stuff. (Much worse than the "home run derby" game above.)
And yet...
And yet they all seemed to have original sound tracks of more-or-less passable game music. Where were they getting this from? Did adobe give everybody a huge catalog of tunes to pick from?
Click the audio tab
That being said, this sort of licensed tie-in webgame probably would have just bought a royalty-free stock music track from Audiojungle[0] or whatever.
There was also a huge market for licensing custom-branded versions of whole Flash games, too. That's why every mid-2000s official site for any sort of media property had Flash games on it.
[0] Audiojungle.
https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/music.html
(For context, there is a video of a YouTuber trying to beat it... and he did, 7 1/2 hours later. He was mostly stuck on the "Christopher Robin" level which basically requires perfect to-the-frame timing.)
There is some lore behind the game. It was a Yahoo Japan title https://www.siliconera.com/winnie-the-poohs-home-run-derby-s...
Thank you, lol
But either way, I played twice and that's enough for me
Hopefully we'll get it back soon.
Will they continue on, and make a "next generation flash" or something?
aka Flash Done Right :)
Flash appears to have been a very capable medium for transporting intent, but the intent of that awesomeness was overshadowed by the shoddiness of the underlying implementation. Flash, in its various implementations, has always amounted "building a house upon sand". You don't have to search far to see this. It was an ignorantly thrown together security nightmare (ignorant in the sense that they had no idea how bad it actually was until the RCE's came raining down).
Around 2005(?) I remember a Flash conference in Turin, Italy where I saw many great interactive CDs and games from artists from all around the world. Tokyoflash, Yugo Nakamura and many more creators that were building experiences which I have a hard time finding these days. In the latter years, there was FWA (Favourite Website Award) full of great flash websites (still remember GotMilk).
And then came Flex and AIR, that made building "rich internet applications" fun.
I left web development when Flash died and coming back to it now, after almost 20 years, and honestly, I don't think we're any better.
Adobe being Adobe, never got to fix the security and performance of the Flash Player (a dedicated surfer can still find malware disguised as Flash Player).
I remember when Tim Burton put out various cartoons via Director (the same used for countless DVDs) that opened up more dramatic storytelling than the business “intros” offered at the time (I built these too mind you).
I was even Flash AS3 certified at one point, something I was very proud of in my early career.
Good times.