The Strong Museum has partnered with web gaming portal and publisher Kongregate to start preserving Flash games.

The collaboration will allow the museum to download and preserve the tens of thousands of Flash games uploaded to the Kongregate portal, making them available for educational and research purposes.

With support for the Flash plugin due to end in 2020, The Strong explained the timely initiative is essential to ensuring a huge swathe of titles aren't lost forever.

"Flash games are an important piece of gaming history. They provided access to countless games for free to anyone with an Internet connection," said Andrew Borman, the museum's digital games curator.

"Flash games were relatively easy to create, and therefore they opened the game development process to thousands of people, some of whom went on to produce commercial games. Flash games also introduced themes and play mechanics that became popular in many video games, especially with the rise in the popularity of mobile games."

Outlining its approach to preservation, The Strong said it will store the digital materials of chosen Flash games, including all of the associated metadata, and will "implement best practices" to ensure each game can be played as originally intended.