Flash game preservation evolves with The Elephant Collection

gamedeveloper.com:

December 31, 2020 marked the day in which Adobe officially ceased support of Flash Player. Starting January 21, 2021, the company blocked Flash content from running with the plugin. This, of course, shuttered hundreds of thousands of games and animations that people had been making for over two decades. Many studios you know of nowadays, such as The Behemoth ( Alien Hominid , Castle Crashers ) and Cellar Door Games ( Rogue Legacy ), got their start in Flash.

One prominent developer and current CEO of Armor Games, John Cooney, built a notorious presence around his work thanks to projects like This is the Only Level and Achievement Unlocked . After lending a hand making The Scriptwelder Collection happen alongside Armor Games Studios, which bundles the Deep Sleep and Don't Escape games from Flash developer scriptwelder for Steam, Cooney is giving the same treatment to some of the games in his portfolio with The Elephant Collection .

The idea for The Elephant Collection came to mind five years ago. As Cooney tells Game Developer over Zoom, he thought it would be a good way of preserving some of his games (a total of ten) by bringing them over to Steam in one package. Not just to present a modernized time capsule of his work in Flash to new audiences, but to share them with people who, up to this day, are still sending him text support emails about these games, and asking if they will ever receive a port.

"Alongside all the work that went into thinking what does this look [like]," he says, "[such as] how many games should be there, which games are important, should we do all of them or only some of them, life caught up in a lot of ways. I ended up having two children, there was the