About
About this site
The browser as a games platform: its runtimes, and what happened when they were switched off.
The story runs from a program written on a DEC PDP-10 at the University of Essex in 1978 to a Flash Player rebuilt in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly. In between, for roughly fifteen years, the browser was the largest games platform in the world — no install, no store, no gatekeeper — and the thing holding it up was one company’s plugin.
Adobe ended that plugin on 31 December 2020 and began blocking its content twelve days later. Nothing was deleted; the files simply stopped being readable. That is the technical half of the site. The other half is what people did about it: Ruffle, Flashpoint, the Internet Archive, and the museums and libraries that hold the hardware and the paperwork.
How it is arranged
Twenty-five entries across six sections. Every runtime, portal, project and archive named here is a real one, and each entry states what it took with it.
What the machine could play was decided by the cards inside it, and none of that was the browser’s business.
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