The browser as a games platform: its runtimes, and what happened when they were switched off.
01 The Text Era
In 1978 Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote a persistent shared world made entirely of text at the University of Essex, and everything multiplayer descends from it.
Read the entry →Green on black and nothing else: the runtime, the game and the interface were all the same twenty-four lines.
oujouer.com collection
Adobe switched off Flash Player on 31 December 2020, and the games did not survive the plugin.
Source — Adobe, Flash Player end-of-life notice, 2017
The shutdown, and the answer to it
The failure mode was never an error message about Flash. It was an empty rectangle.
oujouer.com collection
04 The End of Flash
Adobe ended support on the last day of 2020, and tens of thousands of games became unplayable at once.
Read the entry →
Rebuilding a player from its file format, one instruction at a time, in public.
oujouer.com collection
05 Emulation
An open-source reimplementation of the runtime, written to run inside the browser that removed the original.
Read the entry →Every entry is one runtime, and what it took with it.
Sun’s answer to running real code in a page. Jagex built RuneScape on it in Cambridge. Oracle deprecated the plugin in Java 9 and removed it in Java 11.
Macromedia Director’s output, put on the web. Heavier than Flash, better at 3D, and never as widely installed.
Began as FutureSplash Animator; Macromedia bought the company in 1996 and renamed it. Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005 and ended the player fifteen years later.
Microsoft’s plugin, aimed at video and rich applications. Chrome’s removal of NPAPI in 2015 took most of its reach.
A plugin that put a full 3D engine in a page. Unity’s browser target moved to WebGL, which needs no plugin at all.
Canvas, audio and a compile target in the browser itself. WebAssembly became a W3C recommendation in December 2019 — and it is what Ruffle is built out of.
Organisations backing the work of writing this down
Principal supporters
01 The Text Era
In 1978, at the University of Essex, Roy Trubshaw wrote a program that let more than one person stand in the same imaginary room at the same time. Richard Bartle took over its development and ran the world for years. Everything since — the portals, the plugins, the persistent worlds — descends from a text file on a DEC PDP-10 in Colchester.
One machine, many doors. Every terminal in the row was logged into the same world.
oujouer.com collection
05 Emulation / 06 Archives
Ruffle re-implements the Flash Player itself in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly. The Internet Archive runs it in the browser so that files it already held could be opened again. Neither project preserves games. They preserve the runtime, and the games follow.
Labelled, powered and indexed — and still unreadable without a program that understands the format.
oujouer.com collection
Bartle, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs”, 1996
Act on the world. Points and levels are the object.
Interact with the world. The map is the object.
Interact with other players. The people are the object.
Act on other players. The reaction is the object.
A shared world made entirely of words.
4 entries
The layer between the game and the browser.
6 entries
Where the games were actually found.
4 entries
A dated, announced, deliberate shutdown.
4 entries
Emulate the runtime, not the game.
4 entries
Where any of it survives.
3 entries
