From Flash to HTML5: A Short History of Browser Games
Published
Playing a game inside a web browser feels like the most ordinary thing in the world now. It took about twenty-five years, one hugely popular plug-in, and one very public argument to get here. This is the short version of the story.
Before the web: the ideas were already old
Many of the games you play in a browser today are far older than the browser. Pong arrived in arcades in 1972. Breakout, the grandparent of every brick-breaking game, followed in 1976. Snake games existed in arcades in the 1970s and reached a vast audience when one was included on Nokia mobile phones from 1997.
These designs have lasted because they are so simple. A bat and a ball, or a line that must not cross itself, needs very little computing power. That made them ideal for the early web.
The first browser games
In the middle of the 1990s, web pages were mostly text and still pictures. Anything that moved needed an extra piece of software. Java applets were one early route, and for a while small Java games were dotted around the web. They were slow to start and awkward to use, but they proved the idea: a game could be delivered through a web page.
The Flash years
Then came Flash. It began as an animation tool, and by the early 2000s the Flash Player plug-in was installed on almost every desktop computer. It let one person with modest skills make an animated, interactive game and put it online for everyone.
The result was an explosion of creativity. Sites such as Newgrounds, Miniclip and later Kongregate collected thousands of games, most made by hobbyists and small teams. Many were rough. Some were brilliant, and plenty of professional game designers began their careers this way. For anyone who had a school computer room in the 2000s, Flash games were part of growing up.
Flash also powered the social games that swept through Facebook around 2009 and 2010, when millions of people were suddenly tending virtual farms.
The phone problem
In 2007 the iPhone launched, and it did not run Flash. It never would. In April 2010 Steve Jobs published an open letter, "Thoughts on Flash", explaining why Apple would not allow it on its phones and tablets. He cited battery life, security, and performance on touchscreens, and argued that open web standards were the future.
Whatever one thought of the argument, the effect was decisive. People were moving to phones in huge numbers, and the most popular way of making web games did not work on them.
HTML5 arrives
The replacement had been taking shape for some time. The canvas element, a drawing surface built into the page, first appeared in Apple's browser in 2004 and was adopted by others. JavaScript engines became dramatically faster after 2008 as browser makers competed on speed. WebGL brought hardware-accelerated 3D to browsers in 2011. The HTML5 standard itself was formally completed in 2014.
Put together, these meant a browser could do natively what once needed a plug-in. And native meant it worked on phones.
Two games showed what that made possible. In March 2014, a young developer named Gabriele Cirulli put a small number puzzle called 2048 online. It was built with plain web technology, it worked on any device, and it spread around the world in days. A year later, Agar.io dropped players into a shared arena as hungry cells and started the whole family of ".io" games.
The end of Flash
In 2017 Adobe announced that Flash would be retired. Support ended on 31 December 2020, and browsers removed it soon afterwards. A great many old games stopped working overnight.
They were not all lost. Volunteers have archived tens of thousands of Flash games, and emulators now let many of them run again without the original plug-in. It is one of the larger preservation efforts in the history of games.
Where things stand
Today's browser games load in seconds, work on almost any screen and need nothing installed. In one sense, things have come full circle. The most popular HTML5 games are often the oldest ideas: a snake, a bat and ball, a wall of bricks, sliding tiles.
The technology has changed three times over. The pleasure of a simple game that starts immediately has not changed at all.