Developers create tool to archive and play 38,000 old Flash games

Forget the PlayStation 5 and the latest video cards to play the latest games. You used to play the best games, in Flash. Flash will soon no longer exist, but BlueMaxima has archived 38,000 games so that you can still play them.

A group of hackers tries to keep the old Flash games alive with a new project. That project is called Flashpoint, and it aims to preserve old web games that were playable in Adobe’s Flash Player by being able to play them in a separate client. The creators have indexed 38,526 Flash games. These can be played in a client that BlueMaxima has designed itself. Players can download the client including all games. That Ultimate version is 288GB in size. There is also a smaller client where the games can be downloaded separately. The client also has support for Linux. The client runs Flash in a separate container. According to the makers, the games are not transferred to HTML5 because that is not possible automatically.

The tool is being created because Adobe Flash will be discontinued at the end of this year. The software, which has suffered from security vulnerabilities for years, will then no longer be supported by Adobe and most major software manufacturers. The makers say they believe it is important to preserve Internet history, and that the old Flash games are “a significant part of the culture that is doomed to obscurity.” The makers use as much open source software as possible. All code has been put on GitHub for others to build on. The designers say in a faq that they are not sure how legal it is. “The answer is that nobody knows and nobody should care.” The makers say that game developers who do not want their games in the tool can contact them.