Flash Emulation

Flash has been slowly dying for several years now, but Adobe scorched the earth as of Jan 1 2021 by deleting all previous versions of it from its servers and blocking any online plugins or players that attempt to use it. 

While there were millions of janky Flash games that really aren't worth preserving, there are at least hundreds (if not thousands) that were really quite good. 

Fortunately, there is still a broad range of options for running old Flash games. 

- What's the file format of Flash games? Can they only be streamed online?

Flash games are (usually) packaged conveniently in one nice .SWF file. Some online game sites would just load this file directly in the web browser, which meant that you could also save it for local use. But more often than not, game sites would have added code preventing direct access to the .SWF file (or at least making it require some extra steps that aren't common knowledge). 

There are a number of sites dedicated to collecting games in .SWF format for easy download:

* SWFChan - More of a focus on "adult" games but has all sorts of stuff

* Search archive.org for SWF files, for example here's the older Armor Games collection  

* The Flash Game Archive  

However, having an .SWF file doesn't guarantee that the game will run right. As with online-only MMOs and such, some Flash games were coded to communicate with a remote server for certain functions and are not going to work right (or at all) if that server doesn't exist anymore, or you're not online, or you're playing it with a method that just doesn't do internet communication. Some were also coded to open other external files (including multiple other SWF files) that might not be available. 

- OK, so how do I play .SWF files once I have them?

There are a whole bunch of ways. We'll start with the simplest first. 

First, if you're looking for a game hosted by a major portal site (like Newgrounds or Armor Games) it may well still be there. Adobe announced that it was killing Flash back in 2017, so these sites have had plenty of time to make preparations. Some are running a Flash emulator (such as Ruffle) to keep their old games online, some have converted Flash games to HTML5, some do a mix of both. And The Internet Archive has set up its own emulation portal that has thousands of games that can be played in-browser. 

And though Adobe has formally abandoned Flash they have left up one means of opening SWF files: Adobe Flash Player Projector. The link goes to a version of the final release (version 32) that is unlocked. But this method won't help most mobile device users. So we'll cover some more options below. 

Web browsers will still play Flash games offline if they still have a Flash plugin installed, just by opening the SWF file with them. The only problem here is that newer browsers have mostly removed Flash support; you'll need an older version of the big-name ones (probably from at least a couple of years ago). Finding an old browser version isn't hard, most of them maintain archives of all their releases, like Firefox. If you have Adobe Flash Player installed on your system, you probably won't even need a browser-specific plugin. That one is a bit more complicated now since Adobe no longer distributes it. However, a bunch of third-party software download sites may still have older copies of it that they kept as local downloads that aren't just web installers that link back to Adobe - try DigitalTrends, Softpedia, Internet Archive, you may have to Google around some and experiment to find a site that isn't just the basic web installer that will crash out when it calls to Adobe's servers for the real files. Only other option is to find old browser-specific plugins somewhere. If you have old computers around, you might have any or all of this stuff installed on them from back when it was a key piece of the web experience. 

If you really still want to play Flash games in-browser for that nostalgic value, you can do it with Firefox fork Waterfox Classic  (which is also useful as a browser for older computers, though it's not the safest thing to cruise around the internet with). 

If you're running Windows, the free Media Player Classic also plays Flash games (provided a Flash plugin or the standalone player is installed). This is a third-party open source project that doesn't come with Windows, get it here. Another Windows option that does this is PotPlayer, though that's ad-supported. If you're on MacOS, apparently The Unarchiver does this too. 

Some people are also creating various Flash emulators / frontends. The biggest example to date is BlueMaxima's Flashpoint, which has you download frontend software and you can then use that to individually download stuff from a catalog of 70,000 games that have been preserved. The advantage of projects like this is that they create the capacity to restore some of the online-required functionality of the original games. The Flash Game Archive has a similar frontend for its library of downloads. 

It's trivial to get Flash games running on a computer, but things are much more limited for Apple iOS and Android users right now. On smartphones and tablets, your best bet is to look at the portal sites and online in-browser archives described in the first paragraph. If you can't find the game there you may have to scout around for an old mobile browser version with an old plugin installed, which might involve annoying sideloading or even jailbreaking. The situation is challenging because Apple never allowed Flash on the platform and Android only supported it for a short while, so the only answer to this in the future might be someone creating a mobile-specific emulator or something.