What happened to Flash games — and what replaced them

Why Adobe killed Flash

In July 2017, Adobe announced that Flash Player would be discontinued by the end of 2020, working alongside Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla on the timeline. The reasons were public and mostly about security: Flash had been one of the most exploited pieces of software on the internet for years, with a long history of vulnerabilities that let attackers run code on a visitor's machine just by getting them to open a page.

Flash also never ran well on batteries or touchscreens, which is part of why Apple refused to support it on the iPhone and iPad from the start. Steve Jobs laid out the case against Flash publicly in 2010, years before Adobe's own announcement, pointing at security, battery life and the fact that the mobile web was moving to open standards instead of a closed, third-party plugin.

What actually happened to the games

The games themselves mostly weren't deleted — the software that ran them was. Thousands of Flash games built between roughly 2000 and 2015 by small studios and hobbyists were left without a player, and after January 2021 browsers wouldn't run the .swf file format at all, no matter what. Some publishers pulled their portals down entirely; others, including Newgrounds and Kongregate, kept their archives online and worked on ways to make old Flash content playable again.

How people still play old Flash games

The main route back in is Ruffle, an open-source Flash Player emulator built in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, which runs entirely inside the browser with no plugin install and none of the security risk that came with the original Flash runtime. Sites including Newgrounds and the Internet Archive's Flash game collection use Ruffle to run thousands of preserved .swf files directly in a browser tab.

It isn't a perfect fix — some games that leaned on obscure Flash features still don't run correctly — but a large share of the classic library is playable again this way, for free and without breaking any law, since the games are running through an emulator rather than a copy of the original plugin.

HTML5 games vs Flash games: what actually changed

An HTML5 game is just a web page. Its graphics run through the browser's own canvas or WebGL engine, its code is standard JavaScript, and the browser sandboxes it the same way it sandboxes every other site you visit. That closes off the entire class of exploit that made Flash risky, and it means an HTML5 game works on any device with a modern browser, phones and tablets included, where Flash never ran at all.

The tradeoff is that HTML5 games are usually built fresh rather than ported over. Recreating a Flash game's exact code in HTML5 is real engineering work, not a file conversion — so what you play today is either a new build made in the spirit of a Flash-era favorite, or, via Ruffle, the original file running inside an emulator rather than a native HTML5 game.

Where crokocat fits in

Snake, Brickstorm and Invaders on crokocat aren't Flash games running through an emulator — they're built as HTML5 originals from the ground up, in the spirit of the arcade era those genres came from. Samurai Snake steers with the arrow keys, WASD or a swipe on mobile, and adds a ninja-snake duel on top of the classic grow-and-avoid-your-tail loop. Brickstorm keeps the mouse- or arrow-key paddle and the falling powerup capsules — lasers, multiball — that brick-breakers have used for decades. Invaders rebuilds the 1978 arcade cabinet down to the CRT scanlines, with 55 marching aliens, four bunkers and a mystery UFO.

Because they're HTML5 rather than Flash, all three load instantly with no plugin, play the same on a phone as on a desktop, and don't carry any of the security baggage that got Flash killed off in the first place.

Samurai SnakeSnake reforged in 16-bit 3D — with a ninja bossPlay now

BrickstormSmash every brickPlay now

Frequently asked questions

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Play it here

• Samurai Snake — Snake reforged in 16-bit 3D — with a ninja boss
• Brickstorm — Smash every brick
• Invaders — Defend the Earth