To be “very online” in the late 90’s through the aughts meant a certain fluency with Flash. Before influencers got locked into a few platforms, people built wacky Flash games and movies and uploaded them to forums for free. The first decade of my career was spent cursing at that app or trying to figure out how to properly detect if the plug-in was installed. Flash was hugely influential in the much smaller world of online creators and it’s now all but gone, so this is amazing to see from the Internet Archive, as usual.

Technically, this is pretty nifty. The emulator is written in Rust and targets browsers that support WebAssembly. Seems to work pretty well, though I couldn’t get any of the audio to play on my iPad.

(The Strongbad email archive is, thankfully and necessarily, included)