Do you remember playing Flash games? I remember kids playing them during class, or sharing websites with each other. I remember browing free game pages for hours, looking for puzzle platformers and logic games and dollmakers and all kinds of ways to have some fun after school!
Unfortunately, since Adobe ended support for the program at the end of 2020, a lot of those games aren't functional anymore. You might not even be able to find them online; after all, if they're broken, there's no use in keeping up the pages that hosted them.
It's a huge shame that such an important part of internet history has been lost. Flash games and animations were influential on not only online culture, but in the real world, too. If you remember any Flash game that you played as a kid, there's a solid chance that you can never go back and play it again.
Except that's not quite true.
There are emulators for Flash games out there. Emulators are computer software that emulate the software that a specific game console used, making it possible to mimic running that console through your personal computer. As long as you've got a bit of technical know-how or can follow instructions online, you can then play copies of games from that console with relative ease. That means that as long as I've got a copy of Deus Ex and an emulator, I could play it on my little Macbook Pro. Doesn't necessarily mean it would run well, but I could.
Emulators like Flashpoint and Ruffle emulate Adobe Flash, ensuring that those games can continue to be played if they've been archived somewhere.
Archiving information means storing it away for long-term preservation and use. For physical information, that could mean putting manuscripts and files in dark places where they're away from damaging light and moisture. For digital information, that means putting files in the Internet Archive.
...And other places, too, but the Internet Archive is the largest collection of archived digital information out there. It stores movies, books, software, and even websites in a single location, tucked away from the rest of the web where it could be deleted, removed, or destroyed at the push of a button. Websites are archived using the Wayback Machine, immortalizing them in their state at any given moment for posterity. This is done automatically using bots called web-crawlers, but it can also be done manually. That's how Wikipedia citations are normally done!
That's how we preserve digital information for the years to come. Things still slip through the cracks, unfortunately; no archive is perfect, and we can't really predict what's going to be necessary information in the future. But it still gives us a safety net to avoid important things being lost to the digital void forever. It also means that your favorite childhood Flash game might still be playable yet. Isn't that handy?
