What Flash Means To Me

Many people are cheering the recent news that Adobe is discontinuing the Flash browser plug-in by 2020. People associate Flash with annoying web ads, dangerous security threats, overly animated sites, and pages that don’t load on mobile devices. They have many reasons to hate Flash.

But let me tell you what Flash means to me. It started back in 1995 when I began to use Shockwave (Flash’s older brother) to create web-based games and other content. Up to that point, if you wanted to create your own software and earn a living doing so, you needed to find a way to distribute it. Without a publisher and without getting into retail shops, your best bet was a meager shareware existence, which only worked for a handful of developers.
But once you could use browser plug-ins to put software on web pages, then you had instant access to a worldwide market of users.

I wanted to be a game developer. I wanted to make my own games, not work at a large studio. Shockwave, and then Flash, gave me the ability to create my games, put them up on my own sites, and then people could play them. It opened up a whole world to me. It gave me a career.

By 2000 I had switched from using the aging Director/Shockwave development environment to the new and growing Flash environment. This lighter plug-in eclipsed Shockwave and made my games available to even more players. Companies from all over the world would come to me and hire me to build Flash games. Sometimes it would be for entertainment, and sometimes it would be for an educational project. I had a team of about 10 working on these projects. I wrote three books on this subject that helped thousands of other developers create Flash games.

Our Flash games were good clean fun. They were the reason you were at a web page, not the annoying ads at the top. They provided countless hours of joy for people, and many of these games are still being played at my sites today.

Flash is very powerful. It is basically an entire development environment inside a rectangle on a web page. The more power something has, the more potential for being exploited. If Flash was just a video playback engine, then it probably could have been made very secure. But it would not have been a tool I could have used, and may not have made any impact on the web at all. In the end, Flash probably wasn’t as insecure as people thought, as long as people kept it updated. I’m sure Windows was a far greater attack vector over the years than Flash.

Another problem was that websites would use Flash when it wasn’t necessary. If all you wanted was one piece of information from a website, then having to go through a longwinded Flash animation at the start was annoying. But that’s a problem caused by the designer and developer, not Flash.

If you never played web-based games, then maybe you only saw Flash as an annoyance. If you bike everywhere, cars are just pollution-generating road hazards, right? But don’t discount the millions of people that played, and continue to play Flash games today. And don’t discount people like me that saw Flash as a way to create great content and earn a living.