BlueMaxima's Flashpoint is a

Flash game A browser game or a "flash game" is a video game that is played via the internet using a web browser. They are mostly free-to-play and can be single-player or multiplayer. Some browser games are also available as mobile apps, PC games, or on co ...

and

animation Animation is a method by which image, still figures are manipulated to appear as Motion picture, moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent cel, celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited ...

preservation project that allows for the usage of more than 100,000 rich web applications that are no longer possible to play online after all major browsers removed native support for

NPAPI Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) was an application programming interface (API) of the web browsers that allows plugins to be integrated. Initially developed for Netscape browsers, starting in 1995 with Netscape Navigato ...

-enabled plugins, most notably

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia Computing platform, software platform used for production of Flash animation, animations, rich web applications, application software, desktop applications, mobile apps, mo ...

. The project was initiated by Australian Ben Latimore in 2018, initially as part of a separate project called

Archive Team Archive Team is a group dedicated to digital preservation and web archiving that was co-founded by Jason Scott in 2009. Its primary focus is the copying and preservation of content housed by at-risk online services. Some of its projects include ...

. The project has developed a launcher for playing the archived games and animations, which when including all games and media takes up about 1.42

terabyte The byte is a units of information, unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character (computing), character of text in a computer and for this ...

s. It works by simulating the Internet, "tricking" the files into thinking that they are being played on the original site, so they can be loaded and experienced. While named after and mostly focused on Flash content, media using other discontinued web plugins are also preserved, such as

Shockwave In physics, a shock wave (also spelled shockwave), or shock, is a type of propagating disturbance that moves faster than the local speed of sound in the medium. Like an ordinary wave, a shock wave carries energy and can propagate through a me ...

Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe Inc., Adobe's Run time environment, runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a v ...

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

, Unity Web Player and many others, as well as deprecated software frameworks such as

ActiveX ActiveX is a deprecated software framework created by Microsoft that adapts its earlier Component Object Model (COM) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technologies for content downloaded from a network, particularly from the World Wide Web. ...

. The site currently lists 71 distinct web technologies as being preserved. The legality of the project has been described as "unclear" but creators who do not want their games included can ask for their removal. There are two main versions of Flashpoint: Ultimate and Infinity. Ultimate contains all games pre-downloaded, while Infinity downloads game files on-demand. There is also a Core version made for adding games into Flashpoint, which only contains a limited amount of games.

References

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External links

BlueMaxima's Flashpoint Official Website
Conservation and restoration of cultural heritage Web archiving initiatives Adobe Flash