Flash Ends: The Rise and Fall of The Internet’s Most Loved and Hated Software

The history of the multi-billion dollar software that transformed the internet and forged a gaming universe, only to become one of its most hated softwares

In the late 90s, two tech entrepreneurs decided to turn their failed drawing software into an animation program for the internet.

Charlie Jackson and Jonathan Gay had thought that PenPoint-technology, tablet and stylus drawing and writing technology, would be the next big thing. They were wrong.

"I think we sold two copies", Jackson told Ars Technica. "And one was to the architect who was designing Bill Gates' house".

But they soon changed course when their stall at a trade fair was set up near that of another company that was developing an animation package for TV and film. Then, at another trade fair, Jackson saw a bunch of products with the slogan “made for the Web”.

Gay and Jackson decided they’d make an animation software for the Web called FutureWave. “We thought there was never going to be a market for an animation tool”, Gay recalls. “But it sounded like a fun thing to build”.

Disney and Microsoft were impressed by the promising small startup. Eventually Macromedia, as the world moved on from their biggest earner, CD-ROMs, acquired the company, in a bid to stay relevant. They changed FutureWave to Flash.

Flash’s versatility and interactivity set it apart from anything that had come before, making it a favorite with website builders who wanted to give their designs a creative twist.

That interactivity, admits Gay, is thanks to a MacUser magazine journalist who was given a preview of the Future Splash Animator: “One of the reviewers went like, ‘You really should add a button.’ We’re like, ‘A button? That’s a good idea!”.

The team rushed to create some basic buttons just before the launch, giving users a way to interact with their design. It was a masterstroke.

Flash’s interactivity kept improving, with one developer working out how to make a basic pinball game. Not long after in 1998, Tom Fulp, the owner of Newgrounds, created Teletubby Fun Land, a fairly risqué game that allowed you to manipulate the children’s TV characters in unexpected, and often offensive, ways.

The next game he designed on Flash 3, Pico's School, would kickstart a Flash games industry that over the next seven years would turn bedroom video game designers into millionaires. This new industry introduced hundreds of developers to the wonders of game design and millions of new players to a world of distractions–at one point, Newgrounds was getting 18 million unique visitors a month–with classic Flash games like Linerider and Desktop Tower Defense.

In 2005, Flash decided to see what they could accomplish with video. As old-fashioned tech firms raced to create a video platform that replicated TV, Macromedia set up the Tin Can Team. That team would end up building a new system that would be adopted by a then little-known startup known as YouTube.

That same year, Adobe bought Macromedia for $3.6 billion. The CEO Bruce Chizen would later tell Jackson that 3 billion of those dollars were just for Flash.

But, then things started to go downhill.

The way that Flash slowed down computers and required constant updates began to put consumers off. More concerning was how it compromised their digital security.

Its shortcomings prompted Steve Jobs to write Thoughts on Flash in 2010, justifying his decision not to support the software on the iPhone 4 and concluding that, "Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content".

For many, this was the culmination of Flash’s demise: with Jobs settling the software’s fate. For the last ten years, the Flash machine has been grinding to a halt. In 2016, Google also turned its back on Flash, eventually banning its advertising from their searches, leading other tech giants to follow suit.

There are still those who have a soft spot for Flash. One group of people even spent the last few years trawling the internet to preserve 38,000 games for posterity.

However, at the end of 2020, Flash will cease to be updated, browsers will cease to support it, and the internet will finally say goodbye to the software that transformed it.

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