Flash, Java and Shockwave based web games are easy to lose from the history pages of games industry. Many games exist only in one single server and when they’re shut off, the game is lost permanently. With larger web game portals shutting down you can lose dozens or hundreds games at the same time.
While these web/browser games are usually tiny by their own rights, they have been remarkable portion of the video games history since the late 1990s and early 2000. The games started a whole new branch in the games industry and paved way for the second wave of the mobile games industry as well. Many of the games have had millions of unique players. There’s also a staggering amount of game genres, from the popular puzzle games to sims and newsgames.
Those games are being lost daily in increasingly larger numbers, as Flash and other old web software platforms are being phased out. Even the Flash player now has official end-of-life at the end of 2020.
The Flashpoint project attempts to archive and preserve these pieces of gaming history. Currently the project has preserved over 11.000 games from a number of different web games platforms and the collection keeps on growing. The almost 80 gigabyte archive has the games in a locally playable format as it runs a web and proxy server in the user’s own computer. This makes researching the history of the web games history and industry easy for the professionals.
More information: http://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/