From Homestar Runner to Salad fingers to badgers, stick figure battles, and the End of Ze World, this — dare I call it an artform? — was a cultural touchstone for a generation.

Flash made vector animation available to the masses, and internet distribution of the relatively small video files was a piece of cake. With the filetype now essentially deprecated, the creators gone on to bigger and better things, the distribution sites shut down, it is a dead form. Most of it will be lost forever, although there may be someone archiving some of it for posterity.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
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    1 month ago

    There are in-browser emulators written in JavaScript. Like any old content, I’m more worried about sources going down rather than not being able to run the flash.

    • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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      1 month ago

      The biggest one (also adopted by the wayback machine) is actually written in Rust (compiled to WASM).

    • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      People jumped ship to prerendered videos even before the death or Flash, using Flash as the video player.

      It’s been over a decade since I learned this, but if I recall correctly, SWF animations that were large enough had desync issues with the audio and frames. The solution was to export the animation as an actual video file and play that back.

  • ccunning@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I too have nostalgia for the animations of that era, but I do think a lot of those have been exported as videos and uploaded to YouTube. It’s not 100% the same but it’s better than nothing.

  • Retro_unlimited@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I remember some great flash games I used to play, and I know they are lost media now. But there are people archiving tons of flash stuff at “Flashpoint Archive”

  • simple@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    They’re not lost, most of them are archived via Flashpoint. The most notable ones have also been exported as regular videos on sites like Newgrounds. But yeah, I miss that Flash era where people made fun animations and games for whatever was on their mind.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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      1 month ago

      The thing I find that is lost is the blurring of the line between video game and animation. Homestar Runner cartoons were often interactive, they made several outright games but also the things that were closer to animations often had easter eggs in them, from (in Strong Bad’s words) dumb stuff that would pop up to entire extra scenes.

      Early Youtube had a thriving animation community, but given the limitations of video-based content they really couldn’t do those interactive elements, then Flash died, and now that culture is basically gone.

  • W.itjust.works@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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    1 month ago

    Is the tech no longer possible? I have a feeling of no current browser support and security issues, but could one just have a private server for hobbyists?

  • Frozyre@kbin.melroy.org
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    1 month ago

    Nah, they’re still out there in other forms. Some other people, have archived the SWF files (like StickDeath’s) on Internet Archive.

    I just miss going to the actual sites to view them in. I was going to say that Joe Cartoon was the last beacon of that but if you go there, it’s just YT videos all decorated around the site’s design. It’s not the same.

  • dragontamer@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    1 month ago

    Flash still got it good.

    Consider the entire generation of 1970s and 1980s Betamax footage that is basically lost today.

    When format wars snap to one side: VHS vs Betamax, HD-DVD vs BluRay, Flash vs HTML5, QuickTime vs DivX… The losing side basically loses a ton of footage.

    For the most part, we know how to play Flash right now and mostly how to upconvert it or otherwise archive it. That’s not true of all formats.