Practically Extinct

Adobe Flash Animations and Interactive Applets

Animations, games, and other interactive applets created with Macromedia Adobe Flash Player and Shockwave Flash, along with their accompanying websites. These are primarily .swf files, but they can also include networked collections of .swf files and external assets, as well as the web pages where they are displayed.

Web

Examples

Flash and Shockwave based games; cartoons; interactives.

Imminence

5/5
Immediate action necessary. Where detected, should be stabilized and reported as a matter of urgency.

Effort

5/5
Loss seems inevitable. Loss has already occurred or is expected to occur before tools or techniques develop.

Hazards

There are no additional hazards in this case. See below for details.

Proprietary Data

Mitigations

Migration plan initiated; supported in multiple browsers; security vetted; emulation pathway; clear licensing that enables preservation.

Bit List History

Added to list: 2019
2024: No change.
2023: No change.

Last Review

This entry was added in 2019. The 2019 Jury noted that Flash animations and applets were a mainstay of interactive web design from the late 1990s. Flash animations and interactives were created using tools supplied by the Adobe of the same name. Although Flash enabled the development of sophisticated interaction at low cost over the web, it had a chequered history in terms of browser support and has been plagued by security concerns. The 2020 Jury identified a 2020 trend toward greater risk based on the indication by Adobe that there would be a withdrawal of support to Flash Animation. The 2021 Jury noted that the discontinuation and withdrawal of support did indeed occur. Flash is no longer supported, and loss has occurred with Adobe’s deprecation of Flash and lack of support in modern web browsers. For this reason, the classification moved from Critically Endangered to Practically Extinct with a 2021 trend towards greater risk given the loss of dependence on Flash, which resulted in new aggravating conditions for migration pathway, emulation pathway, source code, lack of capacity or motivation to support, no commercial interest.

The 2023 Council agreed with the Practically Extinct classification and noted an increase in imminence of action required with greater inevitability of loss.

The 2024 interim review concluded that these risks remain on the same basis as before, with no significant trend towards even greater or reduced risk (‘No change’ to trend).

Additional Information

Flash represents a significant amount of the creativity of websites in the early 2000s including net-based art and cartoons. With extinction, archives will need to consider if it is possible to preserve interaction through the development of new web archiving and emulation tools and techniques. These are culturally significant artefacts or so of the web and were a gateway for many early game developers given the ease of which Flash games could be made.

It’s important to note there are quite a number of community projects working on this, whilst the focus tends to be on Flash games there is still work around Flash animations. Projects like Flashpoint Archive do have their own workflows for getting the games/animations but have their own preservation issues. The survival of Flashpoint is reliant on a small group of people with the storage space entirely relying on one person maintaining it. Other Flash game archives exist as well, such as Flash Game Archives. The Internet Archive has a number of Flash game collections as well. There is also work being done around emulating Flash within web browsers through Ruffle which increases access to Flash games and animations.

Case Studies & Examples

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