“How Flash Games Shaped The Video Game Industry: Flash Is Dead. But the Influence of Flash Games on Modern Gameplay Is Inescapable”, 2020-07-22 (; backlinks; similar):
…This Flash game is called Canabalt. A businessman crashes out of a window and starts running to escape the destruction of his city. Canabalt sparked the entire endless runner genre of gameplay, which is now one of the most popular genres on mobile. The game has since been included in the New York Museum of Modern Art, alongside Pac-Man and Tetris. Escape room games, now a popular genre, originally came from Flash games. They even made the jump into real life, with many physical escape rooms all over the world. There were many more Flash games. Millions more. Played billions of times on thousands of different gaming websites. It was creative chaos. Flash games were the gateway for many developers in the games industry, and served as an experimental playground for distilling games down to their most pure and engaging elements. The end-of-life of Flash in December 2020 marks the end of one of the most creative periods in the history of gaming. It all started in 1996, when the Flash player was first released. Originally it was intended for Web graphics and animations, but when it got its own programming language in 2000, developers started to use it to make games. That was the same year we saw the rise of the first automated Flash games website, Newgrounds. Anyone could upload their games and they were published immediately…
[Followed by timeline of Flash games; >20 testimonials from ex-Flash developers and game industry figures.]