Oh, wow, we're there now?

Like, the online hellscape of endless Flash applets and browser shovelware games is retro now?

You get what that means, right? In twenty years you GenZ Tumblr nerds will be in some online forum recoiling in horror at some kid waxing nostalgic about back when you could just play a free gacha game full of anime waifus and where have all the good phone games gone?

It's happening and you're not ready.

Well, either that or Thunderdome. We'll see.

I see you don't appreciate the "click all traffic lights" minigame on every single website in existence

I actually made a random game you can play without login or tracking or anything. Dunno if it's any fun, though 🤔

And you need a keyboard to play. Otherwise it's just a screensaver.

https://nailbar.io/proj/miniduel3/

Sorry about the plug, but I am kinda proud of it.

Issues with Flash and the actual quality of those games aside, what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely. There's no spaces for children on the internet anymore and I think that's really sad, nine year old should be playing Hannah Montana dress-up not get eating disorders from TikTok influencers

Edit for clarity: I didn't mean to come off as though I think the internet was ever safe for unsupervised children because that's not what I believe. What I was trying to say is that the loss of spaces made for children, with adequate content curation and moderation, pushed children on social media which is awful for them

Ebaumsworld.com

Newgrounds.com

I miss those days so much, never forget what they took from us.

I was thinking about old flash games the other day. Swords and Sandals and Line Rider ate a lot of my time.

I'm on a Macromedia kick this morning but the internet really died when adobe bought flash, turning point for me personally lol

I opened lemmy to procrastinate working on my web game and this is the first post I see.

I can take a hint internet.

Yeah, I miss it in some ways, too. It was more of the Wild West of internet.

I would argue today's internet is fully optimized for control over people (when desired) & profitability. Unless there's some Earth-shattering backlash where idk people kill all ads & they purchase NOTHING online unless they very specifically search for it....this is the internet, perfected. The internet is free, our attention & wallets are the product. Traded, tracked, bought, and sold.

I remember playing King of the Hill paintball Shockwave plugin game.

Am I misremembering or would corporate websites randomly have branded flash games

Itch.io game devs unite! There's still hope. I miss Ebaumsworld, New grounds and Miniclip too but I think there a small part of the Internet that still has this charm.

Here's my game dev contribution:

What's in my sanga?

I miss the era where most pages didn't have ads.

The Lego website had a huge collection of games.

What "not leaving money on the table" does to a mf

Lifesavers had a bowling game on their site that was actually a ton of fun and decent quality. All the balls were patterned to look like their candy, but still. It was free and that's where the advertisements ended.

It was a fair trade.

Edit: This might've actually been creamsavers, not lifesavers. It was back in 2002.

For me, it’s the fact that every god damned program I want to use requires a fucking subscription.

Shout out to fucking Blender and GIMP and InkScape. They’re really keeping shit cool.

So sick of this “pay to play” structure we now have on EVERYTHING.

The old internet was like the wild west. Who'd have thought it would meet a similar fate to it too?

And on Nintendo's website, there was an elevator sidebar that'd take you to different levels, each one having some other function like upcoming releases, tips, and stuff.

One was labeled "secret" or something, and opened on a black screen. You'd think it was a broken page. But if you moved your cursor around, you'd find a hidden link that'd take you to their secret page. I can't remember what was there, but I sure remember feeling like an elite hacker at 10 years old when I did it!

I've been inside a few big companies and I've seen exactly how it works.

In order to manage huge organisations, they divide them all up into cost centers. And the website is considered marketing so it gets given a budget on the theory that it brings customers. It uses the budget to make games and it does indeed bring customers.

Then a few years later, the shareholders are asking why their stock hasn't outperformed the market, and they put in a CEO tasked with fixing it, and the CEO asks the head of the department in charge of websites what can he do to address the fact that his department is losing money instead of making it.

I remember when Chex and Dominoes put out games that were better than they had any right being. Chex even gave it away for free.

I doubt this will be the catalyst for social change, but I agree. The idea that society owes nothing to the average person, but ownership class members are entitled to public resources, is exactly what will cause heads to roll, if we get to that point. This is a silly little microcosm of that situation, and I do miss those days.

itch.io, sort by free browser games

I loved their Dexter's lab Flash game back in the days. CN and Nick lost their charm

You can still do that on newgrounds.com