How We Rebuild the Creative Playground That Flash Took to the Grave

Hello, my name is Conall and I'm the CTO here at Zapper. Today I'm going to be delivering a eulogy to Flash, the content platform that delivered a decade or two decades' worth of entertainment experiences to kids and adults around the world. Whether it was before your time or whether or not you did spend many of your hours playing Flash games in the past, an undeniable influence on the history of the Internet, particularly in its formative years.

So we'll talk a little bit about what Flash is and what made it great. We'll talk about its demise and why it's sadly no longer with us. Then we'll talk about how, with modern tooling, we can return to that creative playground that Flash took to the grave. So Flash was a runtime and a creative development environment for delivering interactive experiences for the web.

So the runtime was a plugin that existed within Internet Explorer or Chrome or your web browser and it allowed web pages to have animated and interactive experiences featuring audio and video at a time where all the web browser could normally do is images and text. And then there was a creative development environment, an application that creative developers would use to build those experiences for end users to access in their browser.

And the key thing here was that once a given experience had been built, as long as the user had that runtime in their web browser, they didn't have to install any additional software for accessing the experience. So it was really low friction for end users to have that entertainment. That's, I suppose, a oversimplification of what Flash was, because really it was entertainment for a generation of children and adults. It was a vector for procrastination for those children and adults. It was the reason school kids ran to the IT suite at break times. And indeed, it was also the technology behind streaming video for a decade. It's quite an interesting point that actually video was powered by a device called a video that actually video was powered by Flash on the web for a long time. And we'll talk a little bit about that later.

Now this may be a nostalgia-filled screen for some of you. These are just a selection of the experiences that people might have had with Flash back in the day, from things like tower defense games through to the trial bike physics game or indeed, Habbo Hotel, which was probably the first social network experience by many of kids around the world. I should say that Habbo Hotel was actually technically built with a technology called Shockwave, which is a kind of sister technology to Flash. In any case, the contents of my talk applies to Shockwave as well as to Flash. And subsequently, indeed, the two technologies converged. They were both operated by the same companies.

A little bit of the history of Flash. It started as a vector animation tool called Smart Sketch by a company called FutureWave. But then very quickly, by 1996, it was acquired by Macromedia. And they operated and built Flash Editor and Runtime for about a decade, subsequently acquired by Adobe, maintained and offered by them through to its demise in 2020, when Adobe declared it end of life. From about 1996 through to about 2010 were the heydays of Flash. It was during this time that pretty much any website you visited on the internet would feature Flash in some way, either through adverts or through games or indeed through video.

For considering Flash's demise, it's important for us to have an autopsy and understand exactly what Flash was. It was a number of elements. In particular, in the editor, we had a canvas, which in Flash was called the stage. And this is where you would bring assets and graphics and you would build your the visuals of your experience. Flash was a set of timeline and animation primitives of which the timeline was the key one. There was a scripting environment in Flash called ActionScript, much like JavaScript, built specifically for Flash. And there was a concept of modularity in Flash called movie clips, allowing self-contained bits of experience to be reused. These four features, canvas, animation, scripting, and modularity, were the building blocks for the amazing content from Flash.

And this is where you would bring assets and graphics and you would build your the visuals of your experience. And Flash was a set of timeline and I should say, sorry, a set of animation primitives of which the timeline was the key one. So there was a single timeline in Flash and you could animate the elements of your stage using the timeline. There was a scripting environment in Flash called ActionScript, which was very much like JavaScript, actually, although it was built specifically for Flash. And it allowed you to build interactive experiences, do networking and other things like that. And there was a concept of modularity in Flash called movie clips. This allowed you to build little self-contained isolated bits of experience that you could use multiple times within a given experience or you could use between multiple projects. And we can think of these as the magic four features, a canvas, animation, scripting and modularity. And with these four features, you could build any and all of the amazing content that we have seen from Flash.

There was a really important concept with Flash, which is one of progressive complexity. So if you're a content developer, you can start using Flash without having to use the scripting language, for example. And you can build comparatively simple experiences. That might be animations or little movie clips that you would see on a web page. But the scripting environment and the additional complexity available in Flash was there for when you were ready for it and had a need for it. So there was this really nice progression of technical requirement and technical ability in Flash that means that kids who are picking it up as the very first creative and technical output that they have can get started really quickly and easily. But then that same tool can be used to deliver really high-end experiences for brands or really interactive and engaging gameplay experiences on some of the community that surrounded Flash.

And of course, the content built in Flash was optimized for the web, as in it had this tiny runtime. So when end users were accessing a given game or experience in their web browser through Flash, it was a tiny amount of download for them. And that was really important in those initial years of the internet when people were on dial-up modems. If you were lucky, you would have 56 kilobits of download. I, at the time, was living in rural Scotland and so was not lucky, and I was lucky if I was getting 22 kilobits per second. And as a result, users really benefited from the content being optimized for that short form delivery over the web, and Flash was great for that. And there was no external installation. So as I mentioned earlier, if I want to experience a given bit of Flash content, I don't have to install another application on my computer. And so for all those kids that are rushing to the IT suite at break times to play Flash games, they don't have to be trying to sneak a different exe file onto the computers maintained by the school. Just the web browser was all they needed to have those amazing experiences.

So what went wrong? Why do we not have Flash today? Well, the first thing to say is that Flash was a security nightmare. So it was initially deployed on Windows with a technology called ActiveX, which is basically a remote code execution vulnerability as a feature. ActiveX allowed web page providers to deliver native codes that would run with God knows what permission on the end user's device. And this led to a lot of security issues with content and vulnerabilities, viruses the like, being delivered through ActiveX.

Now, over the years, ActiveX improved, but never was Flash able to get away from this issue of being, I suppose, a natively built application that's trying to run in an unsecure environment like the web browser. On Chrome, there was an API called NP API, which I think stands for native plugin API. And that was the mechanism by which Flash ran in Chrome and Chromium based on native and that was a technology that Google seeks to decommission as it was going to be replaced by WebAssembly. And so, for Flash to be with us today, it would have had to have been re implemented in a technology like WebAssembly so that we could still be using it in our web browsers.

But unfortunately, all of these bits discussed thus far, this security nightmare and these underlying API challenges are not really the real reason why we don't have Flash today. The real reason is this, the mobile phone and iPhone in particular. So, effectively, Flash was not responsive. It wasn't built to be able to handle phones of different sizes and screens of different dimensions and what have you. Flash's stage, that canvas we talk about, was a fixed size. And so, if you wanted to build an experience that would run just as well on handheld devices on the desktop, Flash was not going to be the way to do it.

In particular, iPhone, when it was launched, did not support Flash and Apple were very clear in saying that they would not support Flash. That meant there was going to be this whole generation of devices that people had where you could not deploy a Flash experience to that user. And, as a result, content creators fled to the app store because they wanted to have a relationship with their end users on that device. And so, applications like Angry Birds, for example, were built for the mobile phone native platforms rather than something like Flash.

So, in 2020, Adobe sunset Flash and declared it end of life, much to the disappointment and the grieving, I suppose, of the communities that had built up around Flash, communities like Miniclip or Congregate, Facebook games, MSN games, these rich hubs of engaging content that users would access through these different platforms.

What is the successor to Flash that we have today? Well, it starts with HTML5. This set of APIs built into web browsers that has evolved, I suppose, during the time of Flash's demise, a little bit before, a little bit after. The first important one is Canvas. So, that's this element that can be part of your web page that is an area where you can draw into that space using either a 2D API, or we'll talk about 3D in a moment. There was also the video element which was generally available, I suppose, in 2011. Again, thanks to Internet Explorer being a little bit late in the game.

And so, 2011 was really the kind of point that you could start using Canvas and targeting the browsers that users have. There was also the video element which was generally available, I suppose, in 2011. Again, thanks to Internet Explorer being a little bit late in the game.

And then, the WebGL API. So, this allows web pages to build 3D experiences that are powered by the accelerated functions of the graphics card on the device. 2014 is when WebGL came to iPhone, and so that's the date that I've popped for that there. It's the combination of these technologies that becomes, I suppose, a runtime for delivering these interactive experiences for the web. We have each of the bits we need to give that underlying content.

But, if you remember from before, this was my slide from earlier. The runtime is only one part of what Flash provided for the web. The other part is a creative development environment for building these rich and interactive experiences. There is a new generation of creative tooling available, like Wonderland Engine or Play Canvas. The one I'm gonna talk to you today about, because full disclosure, we make it at Zapper, is a tool called MatterCraft.

There are tools like Wonderland Engine or Play Canvas. The one I'm gonna talk to you today about, because full disclosure, we make it at Zapper, is a tool called MatterCraft. These content development environments are bridging the gap between that runtime and the full creative development environment that Flash provided.

So, we can take a little look at MatterCraft. Although, I should say that what I'm going to talk about here is also true of these other creative development environments. And there are other creative development environments out there as well, in addition to those that I listed. But we've got these core elements that we had in Flash.

We have a canvas. In this case, the canvas is now 3D, although, of course, 2D content can also be built. We have animation primitives. So, in MatterCraft, we have timelines, much as Flash had a timeline. But we also have the ability to have multiple timelines and layered animations. Animations that are independent or work together with other animations. So, a very much more powerful implementation of what the core feature was in Flash. And we'll see that across all of these features, we have the hindsight of Flash.

So, we can look at tools like Flash and understand what were the benefits, but where were the limitations? And if we can, with this next generation of tooling, remove some of those limitations, we can build better, more modern tooling. There is scripting. And in MatterCraft, MatterCraft is built on and embraces web technologies. And as a result, when you're building an experience in MatterCraft, you're building a web page or a website. And so, the scripting is just TypeScript or JavaScript. It's exactly the same normal browser APIs available as you would if you were just making a web page.

And at the end of the day, when you run a MatterCraft experience on an end user device, it's just running in the browser in the normal way. And there's the concept of modularity. So, much as Flash had these movie clips, MatterCraft have components. And they're just like components you would have in React or in Angular. They're a mechanism for encapsulating a bit of experience. And that might be interactivity, it might be assets like 3D models or images, and combine them all together in a single reusable element, a component, that you can instantiate multiple times in a given experience where you can reuse between different experiences.

MatterCraft is a modern tool, as are the other tools I've mentioned. And that allows us to use more modern techniques and present a more modern user interface to the content developer. And so, features like an always-on real-time live preview enables content developers to be instantly viewing their experience, say on a mobile phone, whilst editing it and working on it in MatterCraft. So, you get this really nice, tight, iterative content development flow. And we have emerging functionality tools like a fully integrated AI assistant that allows you to sort of vibe craft to work on and build this content experience in a conversational flow with an AI assistant, or for that AI assistant to understand and help you in what you're building.

In each of these cases, the set of technology is there to try and improve and supplement the creative process that the creative developer is bringing to the experience. So, here's a little set of examples for some content built with MatterCraft. As you can see, the content can be 3D, it's interactive, it's rich and animated. They, in some cases, can have sophisticated features like augmented reality.

In each case, these are short form experiences that users visit by browsing directly to it on their phone. Perhaps they've scanned a QR code or they've clicked a link somewhere. In any case, they're not having to download any plugins. They're not having to go to the app store to download a separate app to play these experiences.

We're leveraging the runtime of the browser. We're leveraging the ease of deployment of the web to deliver a frictionless experience, both for the content developer and then, of course, for the end user. And so, with tools like MatterCraft, we have those magic four features that we needed in order to replace Flash, if you like. We have the canvas, we have animation primitives, we have scripting, and we have modularity.

With tools like MatterCraft, we also have this concept of progressive complexity that you can start using a tool like MatterCraft without writing a line of code if you don't want to or don't know how to. You can use the animation primitives, you can use the canvas and the other features that are there to build even interactive experiences without touching the code at all. But MatterCraft provides that level of complexity for you there for when you're ready, if you want to use it.