With Adobe finally killing Flash at the end of this year, Jonas Richner catalogs not just the time wasters of the early aughts web but the impact they had on casual mobile games today. I spent a small part of my early career building all kinds of Flash things (no games, mostly newsy interactive storytelling stuff) and this was definitely a trip to relive. I’m not exactly nostalgic for Flash, or even the pre-social web that led to where we are today, but I have to admit there was a kind of Precambrian quality to the sheer amount of creativity happening at the time. Most of that has been captured and commodified by a few giant tech platforms, with plenty of upside for the creators who have actual careers building goofy web stuff, of course. Evolution and progress are not necessarily the same path.