Internet Archive stores animations and Flash games

The Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital library known as the Wayback Machine - announced that it began storing Flash animations and games before the planned removal of Adobe Flash from any web application at the end of 2020.

The Internet Archive will display this content to work as it once did, retaining critical elements of early Internet culture for browsers that can no longer run.

The Internet Archive reports that you can already browse in more than 1.000 games and animations it has saved, such as the classic "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" and "All your base belong to us".

The organization says that the simulation is possible from an evolving Flash called Ruffle, and has been integrated into its system. Ruffle developers say that at the moment it is not compatible with the majority of Flash projects developed after 2013, having access to the culture that defined adolescence and adulthood is certainly a small victory.

Flash was almost essential for the creativity of the early web, giving pages of text and images motion, but as the Internet Archive notes, Flash was really important because it was relatively easy to use:

The software allowed beginners to make amazingly complex and flexible graphics and audio representations that ran beautifully in web browsers without requiring a deep knowledge of individual operating systems and programming languages.