Video: The Flash Games Postmortem

gamedeveloper.com:

As a companion piece to our recent feature on Flash game preservation and creator John Cooney polishing some of his most famous work into a modern, optimized format with The Elephant Collection, we took a look back at his 2017 GDC talk on Flash Games. Cooney takes the viewer on a whirlwind tour of the format's history with game developers, from the program's first days at the twilight of the 90s, it's ubiquity in the early days of web 2.0, its challenges and creative waves that Flash devs rode, and its lasting legacy in indie development today.

One of the earliest points Cooney makes is just how good of a tool Flash was for new game creators, once ActionScript (the scripting language developers used to create interactions in Flash) was really cooking.

"Game developers are smart and we saw that they were creating quizzes, point and click adventures, these sort of really bare bones, early HyperCard sorts of games and putting them up on the web. And in 2000, we saw ActionScript arrive, and this is when we really got our hands dirty with programming." Cooney says.

"It was very easy to use. If you were already a programmer, it was very accessible. If you had never [written] code in your life like I did, I could figure out how to make really bad games with really very little amount of code." He says, laughing.

"And what we started to realize is that we were stumbling upon the Holy Grail of game development. This was a tool that was easy to script, it was easy to draw, you could deploy immediately. There was a huge audience that was really excited about this content and it was accessible."

"Everyone could pull up a browser, whether they were at the local library, their school, their home computer, there was a way to get to this