On December 31, 2020, Adobe finally put a stop to their support of Flash player. Many websites and games that relied solely on Flash will cease to function; many websites don’t need the support of flash anyway. Many animators, website owners, game developers, and internet users grew up with and used  adobe flash. 

While being outdated and buggy, it had a certain charm that many people were attracted to. Flash is most famous for allowing independent developers to create a legion of games, which undoubtedly had a profound effect on the indie game scene as a whole. The cancellation of Flash seems to mark the end of an endless world of free and independent games, or does it? 

While tragic, the “death” of Flash games was very exaggerated. While many websites will not be able to run Flash anymore, there are multiple websites that are dedicated to archiving classic flash games. People will no longer have easy access to cult classic games like Papa’s Pizzeria, Run, and Duck Life, games that could be easily searched for and found, but these websites offer these games a continued legacy. 

The internet Archive collection is a website full of “animations, toys, and games” all based in Flash. You can directly launch these within your browser with the help of the Flash emulator Ruffle; an open source media for playing SWF Files, which is the Adobe Flash format. There’s no need to worry about security issues either, which is an upside considering security issues were a huge contributor to Flash’s discontinuation. 

Cool Math Games, a hotspot for cult classic flash games, refused to shut down as well. While many games on the site relied on flash, a ton of other games programmed with HTML5 still exist on the site 

While The unfortunate discontinuation of adobe was tragic, it just means that time’s are in fact changing and things on the internet eventually become outdated.