Adobe announced today that it would cease development and support of Flash in 2020.

Of course, there were (and are) a lot of issues with Flash:

the proprietary nature of the Flash Player plugin;

memory and CPU usage;

stability problems;

security problems;

privacy concerns over Flash cookies;

Flash advertising/malware;

lack of accessibility in many Flash objects, resulting in issues for people with disabilities, screen readers, search engine indexing spiders, or for anyone who simply didn’t have the Flash Player installed, etc.;

and poorly programmed Flash objects.

So it’s not entirely a bad thing that Flash’s time is nearly at an end.

While this news doesn’t exactly come as a surprise to those who have been following the life of Flash since the iPhone launched, it does raise a serious question:

What will happen to all the games created in Flash when Flash is dropped from mainstream web browser support?

How will the history of games developed in Flash be preserved?

[Update 5/2/2018:] Here’s an article on one effort to preserve Flash games.

This is no small question. Over the 20+ years that Flash has been around, thousands of games have been built with it. Many of them are good games that still hold replay value. But without a viable platform with which to play them, will they wink out of existence and be forgotten?

I think the best approach to preserving Flash’s historical legacy would be to create a version of the Flash Player in Javascript or Web Assembly, and then any web site can use that to backfill support for any Flash objects that they wish to serve.

What are your favorite Flash games?

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