Games

You Can Now Play More Than 38,000 Flash Games for Free

Flash is dying, so one programmer made it their mission to preserve the history of web-based games.
You Can Now Play More Than 38,000 Flash Games for Free
Alien Hominid and Stick RPG. Screengrabs: YouTube

These days, Adobe Flash is just an obnoxious thing that makes Chrome crash but it used to be the backbone of a weird and wild world of web-based games and animations. Now, it's dying. Adobe announced in 2017 that it would end support for Flash at the end of 2020.

As a bored suburban student, I spent countless hours playing Alien Hominid and Stick RPG instead of paying attention in class. Once Flash is gone, so too will these games fade from the internet. Thankfully Flashpoint, a new launcher from the archivist and programmer known as "BlueMaxima," has already archived more than 38,000 of these classic games.

Those 38,000 games represent a part of gaming history. Sure, some of them are crappy clones of better games, but some went on to become phenomenons. Bejeweled and Kingdom Rush started as Flash games before hitting it big in the mobile market, for example. Without Crush the Castle we probably wouldn’t have Angry Birds. These flash games are an important part of gaming’s history.

And you can play almost all of them with Flashpoint, which is available for download through BlueMaxima’s website. Players can grab the entire library, a whopping 290 GB, or grab the games they want a la carte.