Adobe Flash Is Dying, But These Sites Will Live On In Our Hearts
Well, the day has finally come. A little over seven years after Steve Jobs essentially killed the product with one pointedly-worded letter, Adobe has announced that it is sunsetting Flash by 2020.
This is just another step in the long, slow death of the old internet — each retiring bit of technology puts countless creative works at risk of vanishing. Some of these will be dutifully archived by way of conversion or emulation, but many will just cease to be.
In recognition of Flash's officially mandated demise, here are some of our favorite Flash-dependent works. While some will live on past 2020, without Flash under the hood they'll never be the same:
Zombo.com
Zombo.com is one of the simplest and best things ever built with Flash — and it's just one dumb joke about Flash. The spinning loading circles and hypnotic voice welcoming you to the site are all Zombo.com has to offer you. You can't even sign up through the newsletter link that eventually appears. It's utterly useless. If you ever need to explain to someone what a terrible early 2000's Flash website was like, just point them to Zombo.com and say "this, but not funny."
There's an HTML5 version of Zombo.com that's functionally identical in that it doesn't do shit. Hopefully it that version will migrate over to the real URL before 2020 comes.
Ishkur's Guide To Electronic Music
This is the perfect example of a genuinely usefully, pretty well-thought out application of Flash, but it still embodies of the worst design excesses of associated with the tool. When you visit Ishkur's Guide the page unfolds itself in a series of totally unnecessary animations, revealing an interactive musical road map with design sense rivaling a 5th grader's PowerPoint presentation. Still, the site presents a thorough (and thoroughly opinionated) guide to electronic music, from '50s musique concrete through to early '00s genres, all accompanied by impeccably selected example tracks.
Not-so-recent musical developments like dubstep and the existence of any artist past 2005 are missing, some of the humor is painfully outdated (though saying Blondie invented rap is still hilarious) and the sample rate on the tracks are abysmal by today's standards. Ishkur is well aware of these shortcomings; he claims to be working on an updated version for 2017. What are the odds it'll use Flash?
[Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music]
Awful, Terrible, No Good Restaurant Websites
In the app-dominated present day, do restaurants really need websites anymore? I'm not saying they should all give in to the likes of Facebook and Yelp, but I can't remember the last time a restaurant's website actually told me what I needed to know about it quicker than asking Siri would. Still, there was a time when fancy restaurants thought it was only appropriate that they have fancy websites, and the results were audaciously atrocious.
Half the links on this ancient Eater list of the 10 worst NYC restaurant websites are dead, but the second worst offending site for Buddakan is still kicking. Weirdly, it knows to shunt you to a more mobile-friendly HTML page when you visit on a phone, but on desktop you can experience Buddakan's design disaster in all its automatically fullscreen pop-up glory (yup, really). It'll be a shame to see pages like these go because they serve as great examples of how not to design a website.
Homestar Runner
What is left to say about Homestar Runner? It still updates every once in a blue moon, reminding us of its innocent, irreverent greatness. Creators Matt and Mike Chapman came up with silly voices and sillier characters who were nigh-impossible to tire of, churned out incredibly catchy songs and they never once made you watch an ad or pay for a subscription to watch their toons. Homestar Runner was the best of the experimental and goofy animations that Adobe made possible with Flash.
Homestar, Strong Bad, the Cheat and all the rest won't leave us when Flash does. Two years ago a short called "Flash is Dead!!!" dropped on homestarrunner.com and on the show's YouTube page, where all the old shorts have been preserved. Of course, Homestar Runner hosted some pretty good Flash games too, which brings us to the hardest casualty to bear…
Every Last Wonderful, Time-Wasting Flash Game
The best old Flash games are deserving of a fond farewell. As a society, we'll never get back the hours we collectively frittered away playing free video games on sites like Newgrounds and Addicting Games… or on Nickelodeon's site… or Cartoon Network's… or just on that one Gorillaz driving game that looped "19-2000" as you played, forever.
Feels like a good time to see who can beat the first level of Alien Hominid without getting hit. Give yourself a moment to grieve for your favorite Flash sites now, while you've still got time.
