Flashpoint Archive (formerly BlueMaxima's Flashpoint) is an

archival An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials, in any medium, or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organ ...

and

preservation Preservation may refer to: Heritage and conservation * Preservation (library and archival science), activities aimed at prolonging the life of a record while making as few changes as possible * ''Preservation'' (magazine), published by the Nat ...

project that allows

browser games A browser game is a video game that is played on the internet using a web browser. They are sometimes referred to more specifically by their format, such as Adobe Flash, Flash games or HTML5 games. They are generally free-to-play and can be eithe ...

, web animations and other general

rich web applications A Rich Internet Application (also known as a rich web application, RIA or installable Internet application) is a web application that has many of the characteristics of desktop application software. The concept is closely related to a single-page ...

to be played in a secure format, after all major browsers removed native support for NPAPI/

PPAPI Google Native Client (NaCl) is a discontinued sandboxing technology for running either a subset of Intel x86, ARM, or MIPS native code, or a portable executable, in a sandbox. It allows safely running native code from a web browser, independe ...

plugins in the mid-to-late 2010s as well as the plugins' deprecation. The project contains over 200,000 applications from over 120 browser plugins, most notably

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a mostly discontinuedAlthough it is discontinued by Adobe Inc., for the Chinese market it is developed by Zhongcheng and for the international enterprise market it is developed by Ha ...

, which can be installed and played using the provided Flashpoint Launcher and its associated tools.

History

The project was initiated by

Australian Australian(s) may refer to: Australia * Australia, a country * Australians, citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia ** European Australians ** Anglo-Celtic Australians, Australians descended principally from British colonists ** Aboriginal Aus ...

Ben "BlueMaxima" Latimore in late 2017, initially as part of a separate project from the Archive Team. The project has since developed a launcher for playing the archived games and animations, and has reached a total size of 1.68 TB. The project allows games to be played through a proxy that receives and blocks any web requests and calls needed, bypassing any

DRM DRM may refer to: Government, military and politics * Defense reform movement, U.S. campaign inspired by Col. John Boyd * Democratic Republic of Madagascar, a former socialist state (1975–1992) on Madagascar * Direction du renseignement militair ...

that relied on the web. BlueMaxima stepped down as leader of the project in early 2023 in order to move on to other projects, including finishing a book dedicated towards the early history of web games named after Flashpoint.

Supported plugins

While named after and mostly focused on Flash content, media using other discontinued web plugins are also preserved, including

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 ...

Microsoft Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich internet applications, similar to Adobe Inc., Adobe's Run time environment, runtime, Adobe Flash. While early versions of Silverlight focused on ...

Java applets Java applets were small applications written in the Java programming language, or another programming language that compiles to Java bytecode, and delivered to users in the form of Java bytecode. At the time of their introduction, the i ...

, and the Unity Web Player, as well as 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 W ...

. Other currently used web technologies are also preserved in Flashpoint, like

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

. As of Flashpoint 14, 126 web technologies are listed as being preserved.

Legality

The legality of the project has been described as "unclear" but creators who do not want their games included can ask for their removal.

Nitrome Nitrome Games Limited is a British independent video game developer based in London. The company formerly developed Adobe Flash, Flash and Unity (game engine), Unity games for Web browsers, but now publishes and develops games across multiple pla ...

removed their games from the archive in 2020, as they were planning to remake their games under

Editions

There are two editions of Flashpoint that are currently released, Infinity and Ultimate. The Infinity edition is an official launcher that downloads and manages games for the user, which provides an alternative to downloading the entire archive. The Ultimate edition contains every archived game and animation preinstalled and is designed to be used by archivists. Older versions of the launcher also included a Core edition, which was a version with limited content included, designed to be used by curators for adding games to the archive. This has since been merged into Infinity as a separate mode starting with Flashpoint 12.

Reception

Flashpoint has received acclaim for its dedication towards both its preservation project and the launcher it provides for easy access. Flashpoint has also led to the creation of a similar project, Kahvibreak, which is dedicated towards the preservation of Java mobile games used on feature phones during the 2000s.

References

External links

* {{Official Website, https://flashpointarchive.org Digital preservation Web archiving initiatives Adobe Flash Windows multimedia software Free and open-source software Software using the MIT license Free software programmed in Rust Free software programmed in PHP Free software programmed in C Free software programmed in C Sharp Free software programmed in C++ Free software programmed in TypeScript 2018 software