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.
A lot of the meme-tier flash from that period has been archived on dagobah.net.
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.
And, usually, throughout.
Fortunately, you can still do almost all of them.
Salad Fingers lives on https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9383CC2C6DBD902F
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.
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.
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.
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?
Ruffle is a Rust-based implementation of a SWF player. It’s not 100% compatible, but it has decent AVM1 (ActionScript 1/2) and AVM2 (ActionScript 3) support already.
It also can be compiled to WebAssembly, making it possible to run Flash in the browser again.
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).
hBomberGuy did a long video on Newgrounds! It’s amazing, but I think it might only be on his Patreon.
Salad fingers is still coming put with new ones lol
I’ve spent a lot of time looking for old stuff from Stick Figure Death Theatre to no avail. It really is quite sad.
We have emulators for it, dude.
Hey, the badger is still alive and badgering!
So is Homestarrunner. Most of their flash stuff still works, too.
They’re still making videos on YouTube at least once a year too! One of the two brother chaps who created it went on to work on the animated show Gravity Falls too.
Many of the pure animations were done on newgro and they still work.
But the games and interactive videos don’t work anymore. 🤔 I wonder what that means for animations that had a loading screen (even i made one of those, back in the day)
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).
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.
