A long-lost art form

Circling back to a post from earlier this month about lost media (yes, I’m still on this train, just follow along here), I humbly direct ye all to the world of the Flash game.

Complete games were made with this ancient software

Also known as browser games, entire websites and browser game series owe their entire library to this software. Andkon, Stickpage, Miniclip, Y8; there’s a chance that if you were a kid or adolescent in the 2000s to mid-2010s, you might have visited at least one of these sites. For me, it was around the time I was nine years old during summer day camp, which would be around 2008. A friend of mine introduced me to a humble little browser series called Sift Heads.

Oh the memories.

One of the few Flash game series I had followed well into my adolescence, it was nice to see it become something of a franchise of sorts with an MMORPG and mobile game entry about a decade later. Older readers may see that and draw negative comparisons to the JibJab brothers and see warning signs at that, but AFAIK the original devs who cobbled this together in 2006 are still working on the game after nearly 20 years.

The main gist of these games is fancily dressed stick figure Vinnie (read: the only one wearing aviators) makes a living installing lead projectile implants into people’s heads, typically with a cigarette in his mouth. For a stick figure creation born from Adobe products, the devs put a lot of thought into the lore. Not so much that it looks like a DnD entry, but enough to make him seem endearing. The short version: born in Italy, mafioso father gets gunned down when he’s two and the widowed mother takes Vinnie to Chicago where all the mobsters end up when New York is too crowded. The prequel game Sift Heads 0 goes through the man’s comedic exaggerated youth as a natural born assassin, and going by the written historicity, while he did a few odd jobs for the Mafia as well, he didn’t start professionally killing people until around 1998 it seems.

A good writer of anything always keeps notes, so I like to think few things were changed. Added onto, but not significantly changed.

I’m pretty sure these days that Sift Heads has achieved “Can it run DOOM?” levels of legendary for being a niche little series about a stick figure who’s better at assassinating things than Lee Harvey Oswald. They’ve remade at least one of the games to my knowledge before support for Flash went kaput and for a time was one of the legendary Stickpage games. Next to this were the bevy of pointy-clicky action games: Andre’s Adventure, Creative Kill Chamber, Johnny Rocketfingers, and several others.

But those are all walking sticks with giant shootable/brain-able heads there, Tiberius. Surely, you played more than that as a lad, right? I did, indeed. To include a certified hood classic, I shall humbly direct you to: Bloxorz!

This game is so old, you’d be hard-pressed to find still shots in HD at minimum.

I don’t know about you, but in middle school, because of the way my education plan was crafted, I wasn’t able to join the rest of my class in the traditional gym class, having a private teacher to gear me up for the Special Olympics until her retirement and I aged out of it by the end of 7th grade. In the meantime at school, and once again during day camp until I aged out of it in 2011, Coolmath Games had (and still has) Bloxorz as one of its most iconic games. I’m not privy to the details of this, with most Flash games being sent to an unmarked, commoners’ grave, Flash may not have had as much of a base within that game’s code, meaning the devs used a different platform to get it up. Nice.

In a time where mobile gaming is near-par with console and PC gaming, it’s nice to see it’s humble first steps circa 2005, when colorful polygons brought us Oscar- and BAFTA-worthy projects like this:

Rest assured, dear reader, my research on the Evangelion fandom will come in time. A bit longer than Shinji will, IYKYK.

Reminiscing here, abandonware there, s[slap]tposting Eva games everywhere; this lookthrough of museum piece browser games isn’t a continuation of mourning what I consider lost media per se, it’s more a look of “that thing on your phone is a remake, I have access to the original.” And many people the world over had prepared for the death of Flash on New Years’ Eve 2020, so in preparation, a not insignificant amount of these games had been archived either by way of the Internet Archive and this website I found called Flashpoint Project. So whenever I feel it, I can search up something I played yonks ago and see if the muscle memory had worn off.

So far, no, but then again loads of these games are simple pointy-clicky games. Very few require the use of a keyboard, and even for more than just typing something. Obviously the more complex games that can be found on Steam or GOG or Epic Games do a lot more to wear down the keys on your keyboard, but I have yet to recall any other browser games that used more than just the mouse. Nevertheless, Flash has had a storied history bringing kids, tweens, teens, and probably that one 22-year-old baby-faced office worker at most 10 minutes of joy on his lunch break before he goes back to the grind.

Especially if this asswipe was his supervisor

Now, the games featured here aren’t an exclusively exhaustive list, and I could’ve put more on here, but to write about them more intimately past the introductory “this game existed, have a look” would necessitate it’s own post, and I’m only about a quarter through the desired topics for 2026. We’re not yet done with 2025. Take a look for yourself at the archives, not all of them are lost.

Before I piss off for the evening, I’m posting this on my birthday.

Hmmm, how colorless

Three years strong and this is the first post on my birthday. I’m 27 now. All that’s left is to become famous and join Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson and Jim Morrison. IYKYK Part 2: Dark Boogaloo.