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.
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.
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.
Homestar Runner cartoons were often interactive
I got fond memories of hunting for the clickies at the end of the videos.
There are huge archives of flash animations and you can install a safe “emulator” for playing flash that even runs in your browser. Look up Ruffle. I can’t remember the name of the big archive site I used, but it didn’t take much googling. I know I was able to find Homestar, Larry Carlson, Adam Phillips (bitey), joe cartoon and salad fingers as well as a ton of games from back in the day.
Does anyone remember Xiao Xiao?
Guys, homestarrunner literally works again thanks to something called the Ruffle Project (just from reading the website). Enjoy the vector graphics and Easter eggs again
I use Ruffle on my personal domain to host my college flash web page again. I made the super Mario world map into a web page for an internet gaming group on campus and spent way too much time doing it. I was delighted I could host it again.
Newgrounds
I’m a little surprised nothing came to take the place of flash.
There are lots of animation tools that export to video, and there are WYSIWYG web editors that allow for interaction and movement.
But nothing really came out, built on html5, that let you easily create interactive motion narratives or games, so that you could just upload them somewhere.
If they were popular enough (like all the examples you’ve named), they probably have been converted to a more modern format already (like all the examples you’ve named).
You could also download the files and still watch them on a local machine using flash player to enjoy them in the original format, assuming the .FLVs themselves are still available. Makes me wonder if Newgrounds still has any of that somewhere, even if not accessible by the public. They’re still around, but they’re modern videos now.
Theres are some pretty massive archives already, including Flashpoint
Most of this stuff has migrated to YouTube.
For creators that were still active some jumped ship to pre rendered videos, for example Salad Fingers lives on here:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9383CC2C6DBD902F
A major archival project for the whole flash era is Flashpoint Archive (formally known as BlueMaxima):
We as a society should be madder about this
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.
The biggest one (also adopted by the wayback machine) is actually written in Rust (compiled to WASM).
Hey, the badger is still alive and badgering!
We have emulators for it, dude.
