What Happened to Flash Games?
A short history of why an entire era of browser gaming vanished almost overnight.
The short version
Adobe officially discontinued Flash Player on December 31, 2020, and every major browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari) removed support for it shortly after. Overnight, tens of thousands of Flash games — the entire foundation of early browser gaming — stopped working almost everywhere. Sites that hosted nothing but Flash content either shut down or became broken ghost towns full of dead embeds.
Why Flash got killed off
- Security. Flash had a long history of serious vulnerabilities that made it a favorite target for malware.
- Mobile never supported it. Apple famously refused to support Flash on iPhones from day one, and as mobile browsing overtook desktop, an unsupported plugin became a dead weight.
- Open web standards caught up. HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript eventually could do everything Flash did — animation, sound, interactivity — natively in the browser, with no plugin and no security holes.
So where did the games actually go?
Three things happened to the Flash game library:
- Preservation projects. Sites like the Flashpoint archive and Ruffle (an open-source Flash emulator written in Rust) let you replay original Flash files in a modern browser without the vulnerable plugin.
- Straight ports. Some popular Flash games were rebuilt in HTML5 by their original studios or fans, keeping the same gameplay on new technology.
- Spiritual successors. Many games today aren't ports at all — they're original HTML5 games built in the same genre and spirit as a beloved Flash classic. Tunnel Rush 3 is one of these: it wasn't a Flash game originally, but it carries on the same "simple controls, rising speed, pure reflex" formula that made Flash-era arcade games addictive in the first place.
The upside of the HTML5 shift
Everything on this site runs in plain HTML5 canvas — no plugin, nothing that can be "discontinued" out from under you the way Flash was. Whatever happens to browser technology next, a canvas-based game like this one just keeps working.