Poor Adobe Flash isn’t long for this world. At the end of the year, the software will no longer be supported by its creator, completing the long hospice stay that it’s endured for years and leaving a whole lot of the internet’s stupidest (i.e. most beloved) videos and games adrift. Fortunately, the good people at the Internet Archive have stepped in to do what corporations won’t and are preserving Flash through a newly available collection of emulated work.
The Archive’s Jason Scott announced the library in a blog post yesterday, explaining that the site is using “an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle” to “play a very large portion of historical Flash animation in the browser, at both a smooth and accurate rate.”
Even incomplete, Scott predicted on Twitter that the Archive will include more than 1,000 items by Friday afternoon. To help navigate this massive upload, the site put together a “best of” page that offers a good place to start. Those who saw these videos back in the ‘00s will probably be delighted; those coming to them for the first time are likely to be really confused about why the internet used to find The Ultimate Showdown Of Ultimate Destiny and “All your base are belong to us” so goddamned funny.
If you want to lose an afternoon combing through the collection, letting Peanut Butter Jelly Time and Badger burrow their way back into your head, check out the entire Flash archive to date. Or, thanks to the Internet Archive, you can also lose yourself in a spiral of MS-DOS video game nostalgia, old educational videos, and dusty MTV clips.
[via PC Gamer]
Send Great Job, Internet tips to [email protected]