Every entry

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.

Single-player text adventures established the parser and the room graph that the shared worlds then made persistent.

Object-oriented shared worlds let the inhabitants build the world while they were living in it, which turned out to matter more than the graphics did.

The taxonomy of achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers came out of watching an actual population, and the industry has argued with it ever since.

Code that ran inside the page in its own sandbox, with a security model that outlived its usefulness.

The heavier sibling that arrived first and handled the work the lighter runtime could not.

For roughly fifteen years the browser was the largest games platform in the world: no install, no store, no gatekeeper, and one company's runtime underneath all of it.

A competing runtime that arrived late, shipped, and was withdrawn without ever becoming the default.

A plugin that brought a full 3D engine into the page, and was deprecated once the browsers closed the plugin interface.

The runtime that replaced the plugins is part of the browser itself, which is the whole point of it.

A site that hosted whatever people uploaded, which is why so much of what survives from that period survives there.

A curated portal that treated browser games as a catalogue rather than a community.

A portal that added accounts, scores and a revenue share, and in doing so made browser games something a developer could live on.

A progress bar with the sponsor's logo on it was the platform's business model in a single screen.

The end was announced more than three years ahead, which is more warning than most platforms give and still was not enough.

Adobe ended support on the last day of 2020, and tens of thousands of games became unplayable at once.

The runtime was not merely unsupported — it was actively blocked from running, which is a different and much harder problem for anyone holding a copy.

Games that called out to a server, loaded assets at runtime or checked a licence broke in ways that emulating the runtime alone cannot fix.

An open-source reimplementation of the runtime, written to run inside the browser that removed the original.

A preservation project that collected the games themselves at scale, together with the environment needed to launch them.

The framework that let an archive run emulators in the page, so that a catalogue entry could simply be played.

Emulating the runtime preserves everything built on it at once, which is why that is the layer everyone chose.

A library that took on software preservation as part of its remit, and now serves the runtimes as well as the files.

Institutional collections hold hardware, media and paperwork, and the paperwork is usually the part that makes the rest usable.

Source code survives by accident far more often than by design, on a disc in somebody's loft rather than in a repository.