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 Badgermein
1. "Not so long ago, there was sincere panic around
Flash being retired. I'm sure you remember those times.
Was Flashpoint created because of that, or has this
project been a long time coming?"
2. "Were you surprised to find so many people that were
passionate about preserving Flash media, or the other
programs included in the project?"
3. "What are some challenges and/or hard limits to the
Flashpoint project? Or, what are some of the trickier
aspects of archiving these programs?"
4. "What are you looking forward to in the future in
regards to the Flashpoint Archive?"
5. "What part of the Flashpoint Archive are you and your
team most proud of, or worked the hardest on?"
6. "Which browser-based game is your favorite?" |
 Dri0m (Manager)
|
"I'm Dri0m, I joined
the project about 5 years ago. I currently manage
the Flashpoint server infrastructure and take care
of this project as a whole being preserved. I used
to do a lot of webscraping and archiving before the
death of flash websites."
"I'll answer you the
questions with help from our staff to give you
proper and accurate answers."
6. "For me, it's
totally Hoshi Saga."
|
 HyperSamusterArts
(Curator) 
1/2. "I wasn't really surprised actually, considering
Flash was gonna shut down, I was expecting someone to
find a way to keep Flash games after 2020, till I saw
about Flashpoint, and then went into it."
3. "For me it would be certain stuff that you can curate
that is NOT Flash, I had field days learning how to
curate Shockwave, and I haven't tried with other
platforms because these aren't my cup of tea, or are
platforms that already have their content found/unsure
if more exist."
4. "More useful features, and ofc, games and
animations."
5. "I am a curator, I am not that active much but I
always find rare stuff from several sites to add it to
Flashpoint."
6. "Not sure, I would say a LOT since I enjoyed them in
the past, same goes for other platforms outside Flash."
|
Aside from Flash, there are
many other programs archived,
both for games and animation.
 AL_2713 (Tester,
Curator) 
"I'm not someone who's active many places online, but I
grew up with a lot of the games on flashpoint, as well
as computers and the early internet. I've been a
contributor since around mid 2020 and I've been working
on it in my free time as a hobby! I've always been
interested in technology and computer software, and I
feel this project help ignite that passion even more."
1. "I'm not involved in the creation of Flashpoint, but
I do feel it was created, or at least had a massive
affect on the projects creation. Flash's retirement did
at the very least have a massive impact, and made
preservation efforts be taken more seriously. Especially
considering there were very few efforts to preserve
these web games before the announcement, and in general
archival groups are taken more seriously once content is
announced to be going away sooner than later."
2. "I'm not really surprised. These web games were
incredibly popular and served as close memories to those
who played them, especially to larger web communities
like Newgrounds and Kongregate. The idea that these
games would become unplayable, or just gone forever, I
think ignited the sense to preserve them."
3. " Simply getting some of these older programs to work
on modern hardware can be very tricky. Especially
considering some games require specific versions of the
program to even run, or run into technical difficulties
being run in an unintended environment. A lot of these
challenges were overcome by some incredibly smart and
talented members, i.e members with the Mechanic role."
4. "In general, growth and improvement to the archive.
With how massive the internet is there will always be
more websites and games to backup, and it's exciting to
see the archive grow! Even more improvements to our
metadata and more obscure plugins would also be great to
see in the future. There are also so many games out
there that are just lost. Games that have very little
documentation or files available because projects like
this weren't around back then. But through efforts like
web cache dumping or hunting down obscure websites or
sub-domains makes it possible to recover these games.
It's always exciting to see advancements in finding
these obscure titles!"
5. "It's easy to be very proud of the archive itself.
Entries have been added nearly every day for over 5
years by over a hundred members, and it's still growing.
Especially when some entries take hours to get working
properly, or are just a massive effort to find and
recover the files. I'm also just very proud of the
community I’m in. Seeing so many people passionate and
hard working to preserve these games is beautiful to
see."
6. "So many to choose from, but Catch the Candy is
always fun! There are dozens of other games I love
including games from the Nickelodeon site, and
Shockwave.com to name a few."
|
 Sneaky Zucchini
(Curator)
|
"I am just another user nostalgic
of the times of the old web. Neocities, flash games,
webrings, online forums..and so on. Back to a time
when the entire internet wasn't owned by 3 companies,
and it was a wild west where you could discover all
kinds of things. Back when everyone had their own home
page instead of just social media."
1. "I am not the creator of
flashpoint so i cant speak on this, but i believe that
Its mostly because of that panic. Nothing lasts
forever, but i suppose it was hard to grasp just how
much content was about to be lost to time. It was
Geocities all over again."
2. "Not really. I know that
passionate people can be found around the web, and who
all believe in the cause of preservation and
archiving. I see it every day, from those who want to
preserve the old web of the 1980s to old tv show
archivists. I was just more surprised there was THIS
organized of an archival project going, with this many
games."
3. "I cannot really answer on the
technical details of this question, but one particular
challenge i think was a big and detrimental one was
the ethics behind some of the content found on this
project. The project is an archival project first and
foremost. It aims to archive EVERYTHING from the era.
This includes content that goes against a lot of
peoples moral standpoints. This poses an ethical
philosophical dilemma. The job of FP is to archive. It
does not play gatekeeper to what content is allowed to
be archived and not. This is caused a lot of divide in
the community, and risked the integrity of the
project.
Another challenge would be to make
this great tool work properly on other platforms,
specifically the mac platform. Right now, mac os users
will have to make do with half the content. "
4. I am mostly looking forward to
seeing it be recgonized as the true staple of
archiving that it is, in line with archive.org. I feel
it truly deserves it, as the team behind this gigantic
task has shown true professionalism and skill, all
driven by pure passion. I hope to see FP get all the
funding it deserves to keep itself stable.
5. "I am not part of the dev team,
but i have to applaud just how sophisticated this
piece of software is. Its absolutely amazes me how
well put together it is, and how well built it is to
support all kinds of obscure platforms, some i never
even heard of before. I am a curator, and i have to
say i'm so proud of seeing just how many people are
out there listening and learning and offering a
helping hand to make sure every single piece of media
is not forgotten to time.
"I also want to say that i am proud
of myself for being able to learn as much as i have
when it comes to curating and archiving internet
content. Trough this project and its dedicated staff,
i was able to learn the skills to make what i thought
was long lost games playable again. I am proud to have
played a small part in archival of some of the
greatest era of the internet."
6. "I cant pick, there's too many
games i played when i was a kid. But i will have to
say a lot of the games i played on Norwegian gaming
sites, back when my grandmother was still alive. Games
from SOL barn og ung, 123Spill.no and cartoon
netwrok's websites filled my time with joy."
|
 An archive of this size
leaves you wondering where to start.
For your convenience, there
are multiple expertly-curated lists for you to peruse.
 Choror (妹
Appreciator) (Hunter, Curator)
"I'm just an average internet appreciator whose
introduction to gaming was flash game sites. Some of
these were so good (more fun/hour than latest AAA
titles) they stayed with me for years to come, which in
turn had let me found about related archival efforts."
1. "Flashpoint has been around since much earlier.
When i have started archiving games as part of it, it
was still whole lot of time before the day Flash got
retired, but the project was going strong already -
thousands of games made using several technologies, not
only flash games were being archive, among them 99.99%
of popular titles. It's the complete opposite of sudden
rush to protect our collective childhood, we had enough
time to methodically comb the internet (and cache of
computers people played lost games on) to archive the
games."
2. "Knowing how many people remember them fondly, it's
not surprising so many were interested in doing
something to preserve its legacy. What is surprising
though is the sheer ability of technical people devoting
their spare time towards the project. Difficulties
related to making Flashpoint work, especially now when
it supports many more plugins than just popular ones
like flash or shockwave just aren't something that can
be solved by just throwing people on them."
3. "The ultimate limit we have to deal with is that
things of which there's no copy (known of) just can't be
archived no matter what. It doesn't matter that we can't
get some technology to work correctly today - there's
always a chance someone develops a way to go around it.
However, if there's no files at all, no amount of
expertise and insight can help. That's why the trickiest
and most important aspect of archival work is learning
how to look for files we're trying to recover. From
relatively simple things like searching the Wayback
Machine for missing files, through less obvious like
looking on obscure sites (or ones in languages you don't
know, like Chinese 4399 in my case) and even creating a
tool which searches internet browser cache for known
lost game files, there's plenty of ways to recover hard
to get games, each of which require some time to figure
out."
4. "Honestly, simply it being there for foreseeable
future. As long as an active community is there, no
matter what difficulties might we meet in future,
through our shared effort they will be overcame. If i
were to say something more concrete, keeping on
searching for these games thought lost to time - you'll
never know if someone who has downloaded them years ago
is going to pay our server a visit tomorrow and share
the holy grail of flash games (We had this kind of thing
happen with some old Minecraft versions for example, as
well as with the lost part of MOTAS)."
5. "The meticulous tagging system developed after a
rework is really a great thing from player's point of
view. Maybe it's not anything flashy like finding a game
people were missing after it got removed from the site
it used to be on, but it's the day-to-day,
playthrough-to-playthrough experience that makes a game
archival project attractive for wider public."
6. "Stick RPG series by XGen Studios i guess. It has
everything - life simulation, action, numbers going up,
rpg elements, open world, you name it."
|
 Flashfire42 (Hunter,
Curator) 
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"I am Flashfire42 on the internet
and don't feel my IRL name is needed however it shan't
be difficult to find."
1. "I feel that Flash and other web
plugins have long been a part of the net and it just
takes one person to get the ball rolling to get a
preservation project underway."
2. "Having been around since the
fairly early days being introduced to the project
about 4 months into the discord server being created I
wasn't surprised that there would be some push to get
it archived. And I was one of the mad individuals
digging up plugins from the depth of the net."
3. "The real challenges was getting
a lot of it working in the first place. If memory
serves in the earliest days we didn't really have any
way around site locks for example, The Technology
Flashpoint uses is nothing short of incredible. with
many of the plugins being 32 bit it is quite a chore
at times keeping them working on a modern OS."
4. "I am looking forward to the
continual mining of the FlashFreeze archive, Flash may
be functionally dead on a standard internet browser
with slights slowly fading away still but our
archivists were hard at work scraping thousands upon
thousands of sites with old plugins so even when the
search engine indexes run dry we will still have stuff
to curate."
5. "It is hard to really pin down 1
specific thing, Personally I am quite proud of our
Shiva3D collection as I dug through the old shiva
forums looking for links to sites to curate content
but its a real labor of love from all the members of
the team."
6. "Honestly who can really choose
just one. With literally Millions of options I don't
think I will ever be happy with the decision I make at
any given moment. But if I dust off the Nostalgia
goggles and put them on I would say Bash The Computer
or Bloons Tower Defense 3 were the first 2 games to
appear in my head, Though I will pour one out for my
dead MMOs like Club Penguin as well."
|
 Download the archive at
Flashpointarchive.org. It's free!
(Or look at the games you're
missing out on, on TikTok, if you're into that sorta thing).
 Renegát (Curator)
"I used to play as a kid on my country's largest
flashgame hubsite, so just the usual origin story for
the appreciation of the genre, like many others here. I
found out about this server after learning about the
demise of flash, and when I looked for games that werent
on the launcher, they told me that you can curate
yourself without much coding knowledge. I am here since,
uploading batches from time to time."
1. "I am not fully aware of the early days, but the end
of those archaic outdated plugins were always hanging on
like Damocles' sword. But just like emulators for old
consoles, it was inevitable that some preservation would
pop up sooner or later."
2. "I weren't really surprised about people being
passionate about the medium in general, but I found it
surprising how friendly and welcoming the whole bunch
is. With tech projects like this you usually expect the
weird introverted asocial tech geniuses to cause an
atmosphere unfriendly for the ones not in the deep
know-how, but nope, here you will find your place
regardless of levels of tech literacy."
3. "Time isn't on our side, more and more sites will
disappear, with more and more obscure games to be gone
forever (most of the big sites still operating usually
have the same top 1000 best-of games). On the tech-side,
although the programmers did a damn good job to make a
casual-friendly environment both for curators and users,
the process of saving and playing some old or unusual
engined games will always be hard (especially
multi-assets, those are hotpots for data lost forever).
And I don't wanna go into the servers, since it's not my
resort, but I know that it's expensive to provide a good
service."
4. "New games as always, I also look forward to the new
features constantly cooking up (and the addition of new
obscure platforms, they are an interesting historical
remain of the old internet). I also hope the project
gets more widespread recognition, it still flies under
the radar of many people."
5. "What I am most proud of are the games that were hard
to curate, find or fix, but at the end I somehow managed
to do that (the first two at least, I got a ton of help
with the fixing part, thank you "hacker" department).
Sadly there were also ones that were only partial,
reminding you that you weren't fast enough."
6. "I cannot pick a favorite, I have many favorites of
many genres, but what is recently in my mind is the
Strike Force Heroes series, they will soon finally get a
Steam remaster they deserve. And the song "Glorious
Morning" from Age of War will always make me emotional."
|
 prostagma (Curator,
Tester, Moderator)
1. "While Flashpoint was a direct response to Flash's
EOL, there were always small pockets of people doing a
bit of its purpose for different reasons, from server
recreations to torrents with an author's Flash content.
BlueMaxima's ace was in uniting most of these efforts
and raising awareness for the cause."
2. "As a Homestuck fan, I got accustomed to internet
users who archived related content because a lot of
official/fan stuff could and did suddenly go poof.
Flashpoint just came to me as another place to save a
specific kind of media, and you could find other
examples if you peeked hard enough like for Android apps
or Pokémon beta content.
"I was surprised on the amount of Escape the Room games
we had and that most was archived by one person,
though."
3. "We had a time constrain nearing Flash's End of Life,
as websites were shutting down left and right without
all of its files in Wayback. Currently server scripting
is the hardest limitation, mainly to rewrite them from
scratch, which is why we don't usually save games that
require one."
4. "For enough Flash content archived from live sources
that it becomes more viable to look into our FlashFreeze
archive, which is where files are stored so someone else
can look at them in the indefinite future. But also, the
option to "seed" parts of the archive instead of the
whole project."
5. "There were many QOL changes for the launcher and how
we save games in general during the project. But I want
to point at our submission system that replaced sending
games and most edits through Discord to this website,
and decentralized BlueMaxima's role to the rest of the
staff."
6. "Snailiad, nostalgia factor combined with one of
Newground's best Flash titles."
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