A couple of years ago, an archivist named Ben Latimore put out an ebook. Since Adobe began the retirement of Flash in 2017, he’s been preserving .SWF files and the history around them. His book is a chronicle of the Flash era, which he sees as a lost golden age. On the final page, he wrote this about that time:

>… intense creativity, easy-to-access software, notable but not crippling limitations, almost universal compatibility across the entire technological space of its time, widespread adoption by encouraging free consumption and sharing in an age where “going viral” actually meant something, all combining to influence the entire entertainment industry with one strike after another? That’s something that we’ll never be able to recreate, only remember fondly. All driven by a bunch of guys sitting in their bedrooms who watched too much Xiao Xiao.

https://archive.org/details/flashpoint-a-tribute-to-web-game...