The rise and fall of Flash, the annoying plugin that shaped the modern web

Until 1996, the web was static and boring. But the accidental creation of Flash technology turned it into a cacophony of noise and color, a controversial product that portends the advent of the modern web

On June 9, 2008, about an hour after the start of Apple's annual presentation at WWDC in California, the breakthrough Rob Small was waiting for came from the bowels of the cake. Steve Jobs was present on the scene, more pleased with himself than usual. Small himself watched the broadcast of the presentation from London.



An elephant-sized cake decorated with neat berries and topped with a single lit candle shone on the screen to the left of the Apple director. “Approaching the iPhone’s first birthday,” Jobs said, raising his voice, “we were able to take it to the next level.” The cake broke up and a logo appeared. The audience dutifully burst into cheers. “Today,” Jobs shouted, “we bring you the iPhone 3G!”



In 2001, when Smol was in his early twenties, he recognized the possibility - which recognized players in the cultural industry did not notice - that allowed pushing obsessive short clips to the masses. Still not knowing what form this entertainment could take, he founded a company with a name dictated by his beliefs: Miniclip.



Resin, along with partner Tihan Presby, began searching for a suitable platform to implement this idea. They quickly found animation software that could display interactive multimedia clips in any browser and with almost any quality of Internet connection — all that was needed was to download a small player. This software, which was bought and renamed by the web development company Macromedia in 1996, was called Flash.



Miniclip was waiting for immediate success. Interactive animation "Dancing Bush", about the former president, moving a basin on the dance floor in the style of Saturday Night Fever, began in the form of an email, sent out to only forty recipients, and turned into one of the first viral games. By 2002, the company had become the largest distributor of Flash games, and remained so for the next four years. In 2006, Disney bought the Club Penguin game from Miniclip - which, according to Small, consisted of "several waddling penguins in Flash format" - for $ 500 million. At its peak, Miniclip attracted 75 million users a month.



In the same year, Adobe wrote a press release in honor of the decade of Flash technology. A few months earlier, the company had paid $ 3 billion for this software, and this document was to emphasize the global dominance of Flash. Adobe boasted that Flash Player "is installed on 98% of all desktop computers connected to the Internet." 70% of Fortune 100 companies offered Flash content on their sites. The software was available on “65 million devices, including mobile devices, consumer electronics, televisions, media players, set-top boxes, digital billboards, cameras, educational toys and even refrigerators.” Technology was at the heart of the Jaguar XK4 car media center, which offered a music player, navigation, climate control, a phone and car settings. In 2005, former Google employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jod Karim, created a video site based on this technology, and named it YouTube.



By 2008, Flash had become the standard for web video. She helped infiltrate web animation, games, and multimedia entertainment. It fueled a content creation culture that we take online today for granted. But while Jobs paced the stage, Small began to realize that the iPhone 3G would change the way users access games.



He had already explored the possibility of distributing games to Java-enabled mobile devices, but found it rather difficult to play Flash on phones. The App Store seemed like a revolution to him. “It was obvious that for phones this moment would be a breakthrough,” he recalls. “We hoped that this would allow us to create a more intense experience for the players.” But the iPhone did not have Flash support.





Jobs at the presentation of the iPhone 3G, June 2008



Future Splash Animator, as Flash technology was first called, came about due to the failure of another product. It was created in May 1996 by Jonathan Gay. In high school, Gay was present during the construction of a house in the San Diego Mountains, during which his family members worked with artists. He was inspired by this spectacle, and dreamed of becoming an architect, working at a drawing table and devising plans for his own houses. But quite quickly, he learned that most architects do not touch the concrete mixer - they design houses, but do not build them.



Instead, Gay decided to "deal with computers." It seemed to him that programming offers a union of design and construction, which architecture lacks. He wrote a graphic editor on Pascal and showed it at the school fair. Soon, his father bought him a Macintosh computer, and boasted about his son's programming abilities to the creator of the Mac user group, Charlie Jackson, who would later become one of the first investors in WIRED US. “Charlie wanted to create a company that creates programs, but he didn’t have money for it, and he thought: he has a high school student and he won’t have to pay until the program is ready,” Gay recalls. - And I got the opportunity to work on this expensive system for development worth $ 10,000, and write games. This was my first encounter with animation. ”



In January 1993, when it was possible to interact with a computer using a stylus and tablet, Gay persuaded Jackson and former colleague Michel Walsh to establish a new company with him: FutureWave Software. But she did not succeed. The operating system for SmartSketch, a graphical editor for computers with a stylus, failed. This product was eventually ported to Microsoft Windows and Macintosh platforms, with low sales figures.



In the summer of 1995, Gay attended SIGGRAPH, the annual computer graphics conference, to present SmartSketch. There he was humiliated, because he could not sell a single copy. However, all the people who stopped near his stand told him the same thing: he needed to turn his product into animation software.



And although Gay was already thinking about it, it seemed to him that the animation market was too small: distribution was limited to video cassettes and CD-ROMs, so only large studios were engaged in animation. And then he found out about the possibilities of such a new thing as the Internet. “It seemed likely that the system would become popular enough for people to want to share graphics and animation with it, ” Gay recalled in 2006. The company added animation capabilities and changed the name of the program to CelAnimator, and then to FutureSplash Animator. It was released in May 1996, and was touted as "a comprehensive graphic tool for websites."



Success, based on the fact that users downloaded the appropriate player, came almost immediately. Microsoft needed a program that could display video on their website, MSN.com, which was then the home page of any Internet Explorer user. The company chose Future Splash. Then Disney wanted to use this product to create animations on her site. In December 1996, Macromedia bought FutureWave Software, further enhancing its product reputation, and began distributing it as a free browser plug-in. She also changed its name, considering the original too cumbersome. So FutureSplash Animator turned into Macromedia Flash 1.0.



Flash, like most programs that existed for a long time and updated regularly, has changed very much throughout life. “We had problems cramming it all into an entire book,” said Anastasia Salter, co-author of Flash: Building the Interactive Web , when asked to describe the program. But, in fact, Flash owed its appeal to a low level of entry - its simplicity allowed anyone to quickly learn animation.



Each Flash user is faced with a canvas - a blank white page. On it you can draw an image; for example, let it be a joyful cloud. Your cloud, like all other objects on the canvas, has its own time line, divided into frames.



So far, your cloud is motionless. Imagine what you need for it to fly across the page. First you need to choose where it should be, and how many frames it should take. Now, when you click play, Flash will algorithmically create a movement between these two points (key frames), and your cloud will fly around the canvas. (Poor animators made a characteristic jerking movement due to the fact that they relied too much on these calculations). In later versions of Flash, especially after the introduction of the ActionScript scripting language in Flash 5, the interactivity necessary for games is added to what is happening. You could add behavior - let's say that the one who watches your animation can vaporize your cloud with a mouse click.



This movement between keyframes in the animation industry is known as twining, the abbreviation for in-betweening, and is usually performed by artists below in the food chain - this is a long and tedious task. After Flash simplified this process, the artists breathed a sigh of relief. “I could implement the entire production process, in fact, what the studio does in this program alone,” says Adam Philips, who was already a certified specialist in water, smoke and fire spells at Disney when he opened at the age of 30 Flash for yourself. He recalls that his fellow animator, who created the three-minute pilot video, issued enough paper to make the packet rise above his head. And then he had to pay $ 10,000 for its digitization. And this process took 7 months. In Flash, such an animation could be sketched in three days (his colleague discovered Flash after paying).



Flash is essentially a visual tool, as Gay wanted. “We had a simple frame-by-frame model of animation - you could start with graphics, with drawing, and then gradually add new ones, improve your skills in working with behavior,” he says. The success of Flash does not seem to him a surprise. She fulfilled three requests that have long arisen from online. The first is the thirst for creating something richer than GIF and HTML allowed. Flash provided a platform for creating short videos. The second is the versatility of Flash, which worked across browsers and devices.



The third, according to Gay, is that Flash allowed designers, “right-hemispheric people,” to create interactive media and bring them to large audiences. Flash brought visual artists online. “It was possible to connect the visual part with programming, and when the animation looped, the behavior also looped,” says Marty Spelerberg, a designer who contributed to the creation of one of Halfempty.com's early Flash sites. “She combined these two ideas together, and it seems to me that attracted artists. We didn’t even understand that we were programming - we thought we were just learning Flash. ”



Flash appeared in an almost static online world. Most of the movement was provided by blinking GIFs. Web sites made up of HTML and CSS clumsily copied magazine styles: rectangular, tabular, using frames and sidebars, and small digits that had to be clicked to turn pages (that’s terrible).



Flash has changed everything. He transformed the look of the web. Web sites came to life thanks to your joyful cloud and Bush's wobbling back. “Flash meant sound, movement, interactivity,” says Spelerberg. - It was such an Internet, which is shown in the cinema, understand? In pop culture, the Internet is a dynamic, immersive environment. And such things could be done with Flash. ”



The animation could be limited to an interactive rectangle on the page — a small video or a game on the MySpace page — or it could take over the entire site. “This is very similar to the virtual reality that we see today on consoles,” Small agrees. “It was a huge leap forward in terms of complexity, depth, involvement.”



Some of these sites, in short, were outright rubbish. Flash was used enthusiastically and out of place. Especially sad was the inappropriate animation on restaurant sites - they were terrible instances, often characterized by music with a predominance of bass and teleporting ingredients. The Electronic Music Guide is one of the still existing examples that can be viewed; this chaos of pop-lines, bubbles and examples of audio recordings looks like an associative card of a naughty child.



Even truly magnificent examples of sites of that era, such as Vodafone's Future Vision - a changing, iridescent hallucination of graphics, video and sound, demonstrating assumptions about how the company's products will look in ten years - seemed to offer the user to enjoy exploring this animations. “These were labyrinths! - says Spelerberg. “Today, no business would order such a thing - we have business expectations from such things, and we know what will work.” In contrast with the modern business aesthetics of the Internet, there are also strange, almost sentimental websites of billion-dollar corporations that differ little from the worst examples of using Flash: they load for a long time, demonstrate tasteless cartoon graphics, intrusive sounds and an incomprehensible purpose.







“I love that era of web design, but it has a lot of problems,” says Salter. “It was unavailable because there is no page concept inside Flash.” Browser, screen readers, text - all this turns into a nightmare. From the point of view of the archivist or screen reader, these websites had many drawbacks - but they were fun! ”



Of all these websites, one has left the most influential legacy. He gave rise to the idea of ​​the Internet, which we take for granted today: as a portal to a limitless audience where you can study and judge people and their creations.



It was founded in Percassi, a small town in Pennsylvania, when teenager Tom Falp launched a fan magazine to honor his favorite series of video game consoles, Neo Geo. He called it New Ground, and published the first issues on the Internet using one of the earliest services called Prodigy. The first 1995 webpage he called New Ground Remix; in 1998, preparing for an interview on television about one of his early creations, the Assassin game, he changed his domain because he thought the new one would be easier to read on TV. And this name, Newgrounds.com , has taken root and exists to this day.



The early samples of the Falp animation that he did on an Amiga computer in the Deluxe Paint program, and then programmed in Pascal, took a lot of effort. Then he has not yet found a program that allows you to make complex animations. “I always wanted a tool that allowed me to apply my programming skills to animation,” he says. “Every time I tried to start developing games, I came across a very steep entry curve, which was much steeper than necessary.”



In 1998, he discovered Flash. He instantly recognized its importance. “Although the action script was very limited back then, it still matched all my needs,” he said. - At that time, there was no other way to achieve this level of interactivity, and on many platforms. If you did something on Flash, it worked on any computer, in any browser. ”



That year, he created Teletubby Funland, a fun country for teletubbies, in which teletubbies smoked, drank vodka and fucked sheep. BBC lawyers were not thrilled. “They sent me a removal order - a terrible situation for a teenager, right? He says. “A group of Internet Freedom advocates stood up for me, defending the site’s right to parody teletubbies.”



And although Falp has since not received news from the BBC, the site’s notoriety has spread and the community has begun to grow. Falp added chat and forum to the site. Soon it was filled with content by people who created something on Flash, but did not know where to put it. He laid out their work in a section of the site called the “portal” by him, but manual labor soon began to take up too much time. And his next step became revolutionary.



“In April 2000, we set up an automatic publishing system,” he says. The first animation that got into the "portal" was a three-part cartoon about a puppy named Scrotum. “People immediately downloaded games or animation there, and then other users voted for this work to control the quality and save the hard drive. If the ratings during the discussion phase were too low, the file was automatically deleted. After that, the community began to grow. ”



To understand the importance described by the Falp, you need to evaluate some of the "very first" sites. Newgrounds was the first site to publish movies or games in real time. He has the world's first video voting system. One of the first viral videos, Numa Numa dance , went from this site. Members of this community created some of the most popular games of the 2000s (Alien Hominid, N plus, Super Meat Boy) and animations (Potter Puppet Pals, Charlie the Unicorn, Salad Fingers). “It's a little frustrating - some of the most popular YouTube videos first appeared on Newgrounds,” says Falp. “And we envied that YouTube was getting so much attention because of them!”



Newgrounds also laid the foundations of a web-based culture of participation, which we take for granted today.“Newgrounds was an ideal place where people could create content, share it, take part in all of this,” says Salter. “Now we are spoiled for choosing platforms where it has become easier to do this.”



“The Internet appeared, and there were no filters in it,” recalls Falp. “Instead of trying to do more than what already happened, people started experimenting - how crazy, insensitive, terrible things can be done?” This approach led to really amazing animations - like the recognized Brackenwood series by Adam Phillip, with whom what Falp calls "annoying content" - videos that excite teenagers, including animations of shootings in schools, games about killing celebrities, and just mountains of porn. As a result, Falpu got bored with such an animation; in 2007, he changed the site’s motto from “tomorrow’s problems today” to “everything for everyone” in order to “stop attracting negative emotions.”



But the openness of the Newgrounds platform was her strength. “The site turned out to be indispensable so that I can remain a freelancer and build a career in the creative industry,” says Jacek Zmartz, an unprofessional animator with Newgrounds, and now a freelance director. “I remember how I went to MSN every night and worked on games with my friend Shinki, an actioncript programmer I’ve never met.” At the age of 14, Zmarts was paid £ 300 for a “Halloween game where monsters throw bombs at children asking for treats for dressing up as monsters.” This was enough for him to buy a new laptop. Flash allowed fans to create true enterprises based on their passion. “Flash was an outlet for telling your own stories,” says Philips. - This accessibility attracted me. It was a niche for any animator,any artist, and even for non-creative people. People tried to do something with Flash, experimented, and perhaps because of this, discovered artists in themselves. "



“In 2007, you could make games on Flash and make money with it,” says Falp when asked about the Golden Age of Flash. “It was an interesting time, coinciding with the dreams of many: making the games you want and making money on it.”





In the wake of the September 11 attacks, home-made games on Newgrounds were dedicated to shooting Osama bin Laden.



In a letter dated April 2010, “Notes on Flash,” Jobs explained why the iPhone will never support Flash. His assessments are harsh and impartial. Flash plants the battery. He is slow. This is a security nightmare. He decided that the Flash era was over. “Flash is no longer needed to watch videos or consume web content,” Jobs wrote. - Flash created in the PC era - for PC and mouse. Flash is a successful Adobe business, and we understand why the company wants to push it beyond the PC. But the mobile era is low-power devices with touch interfaces and open web standards; and on all these points Flash is not enough. " In 2017, Adobe announced that Flash development and support would be phased out by 2020.



Some of Jobs's criticisms, especially those related to security, have hit the mark. But overall, Apple’s director’s move was tactical. “He was known for his reality distortion field,” says Falp. “In fact, he could decide what reality he wants to see, and then change it to his desires!” It was economically profitable to criticize Flash - he wanted to encourage people to create native games for iOS. “From a marketing point of view, it's easy to see why Apple made this decision,” says Salter. “This is a very good way to maintain control over the software and how the applications look and work on the phone.”



But regardless of the reasons, says Small, the Miniclip audience has already begun to stop using the program. “From 2008, 2009, we began to observe the decline in the audience,” he says. - We knew that this was due to the transition to smartphones. We had to go after this audience. ”



The launch of the iPhone 3G pushed the resin to action. “Two weeks after Jobs went on stage with the iPhone 3G and launched it, we began to explore the iPhone as a potential platform for launching mobile versions of our flash games,” he says. Miniclip has released Monster Truck Nitro for the App Store, a redesign of the successful Flash game. It was released in early 2009 and immediately became number 1, and sold in quantities of more than 3.8 million copies. “That's when we put everything on mobile phones,” says Small. We carried out aggressive cross-advertising of all mobile versions of the most popular flash games on the Miniclip.com website, and as a result, the Miniclip website entered the top three most popular websites from which transitions to iTunes were made in 2009-2010. ” In 2000, 95% of Miniclip's profits came from the web. In 2012, 95% of the profit came from mobile phones.



Small, the author of one of the most lucrative games in the Western world, 8 Ball Pool, compares Flash wilting with VHS: it was sad, but necessary. “Today we have 200 million users per month - we have become much more than we were,” he says. - But everything that we see today in mobile games from the free to play series has roots in browsers and Flash. It was this story that created the current business - the mobile gaming industry - today generating $ 70 billion a year. ”



Internet after the disappearance of Flash has changed. The fall of this software preceded the emergence of a new aesthetic, explains Salter, created by the specifications of smartphones and the growth of social networks. Former demanding developers are now more pragmatic in the design of their creations - they need to first think about what works on a small screen. “There is a growing respect for user-centric design, usability and accessibility issues that were of less concern to the old web,” says Salter. “If you look at old sites, it’s full of all sorts of elements that can cause seizures, and unreadable color schemes - some of these changes indicate that we began to think more about users.”



The second change is due to the growing popularity of Facebook. Its minimalistic design of the first time deprived the user of all the settings and controls that could be expected from projects such as LiveJournal or MySpace. “Such aesthetics and versatility have seriously influenced how social networks treat user content - we see a lot of interesting content created by users that fits into the rigid framework of the social network ecosystem template,” says Salter. - It is practical, it works on many devices and for many purposes. And it's boring! ”



Gay believes that certain global shifts have also occurred in the design aspirations of the Internet. Flash designers tried to lure their audience with the immersive effect; they tried to "emulate the sensations of watching TV or a movie." “But it turned out that the Twitter model is more suitable for holding attention,” he explains. - The key to this is information pokes, photos of Kim Kardashian. People need these bumps, not the feeling of sinking. ”



Newgrounds has not used Flash for many years. During the 2012 redesign, the site removed the word Flash from the name of the portal. But Falp misses the loss of a universal platform and the breakdown of the Internet into separate ecosystems. “If you did anything on Flash, it worked on any computer, in any browser,” he says. “It’s a pity that they couldn’t do better and continue this idea.”



Falp is working diligently to save Flash content to Newgrounds. Like any site, it stores a huge and valuable archive of human behavior, with all these celebrity shooting toys. In 2012, Newgrounds launched Swivel, which converts old Flash files to MP4 video. In April of this year, the beta version of Newgrounds Player, the Flash content player for desktop computers, was launched. Falp hopes that “in the not too distant future” will develop a Flash emulator - which will retain the ability to play old games and watch old videos in the browser. “It's pretty funny to imagine a person who thinks Flash is dead, who visits the site sometime in 2021, launches an old Flash game in his browser, and wonders if it still works,” he says. “It will look as if the Flash player has not disappeared.”