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.

  • simple@lemm.ee
    1431·
    3 months 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
      33·
      3 months 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.

  • Masta_Chief@lemmy.world
    46·
    3 months ago

    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

    • czardestructo@lemmy.world
      5·
      3 months ago

      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.

      For anyone that cares

    • pivot_root@lemmy.world
      4·
      3 months 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.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
    211·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
    20·
    3 months 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
      19·
      3 months ago

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

  • PeriodicallyPedantic
    15·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • Captain Howdy@lemm.ee
    12·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • ccunning@lemmy.world
    10·
    3 months 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.

      • eyes@lemmy.world
        3·
        3 months ago

        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.

        • ripcord@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 months ago

          They both also worked on Yo Gabba Gabba, though one (Matt) has definitely appeared to do a lot more writing/production work (and a good bit of voice work)

  • dragontamer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    3 months 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.

    • Mesa@programming.dev
      1·
      3 months ago

      Certainly. I don’t think I ever watched or played it, but I remember young me pronouncing it “zack-see-oh zack-see-oh” every time it came up, which was a lot because I lived on Flash games.