03 Portals
Miniclip
A curated portal that treated browser games as a catalogue rather than a community.
A catalogue rather than a community — identical machines, identical sessions, nothing to log into.
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A curated portal that launched in 2001 and quietly became one of the largest browser-game destinations in the world — by editing what it put in front of people.
A catalogue, not a crowd
Where Newgrounds ran on community submission and shock value, Miniclip operated more like a shelf: games were selected, hosted, and presented under a clean interface with categories and a search bar. Founded in 2001 in the United Kingdom by Robert Small and Tihan Presbie, the site grew rapidly by treating browser games as a product to be curated rather than a stream to be sorted. By the mid-2000s it was routinely cited as one of the most-visited games sites in the world, with hundreds of millions of registered users across multiple languages.
The upload culture ran on ordinary domestic hardware: burned discs, a tablet, and no gatekeeper.
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The catalogue ran almost entirely on Flash. Miniclip licensed games from developers rather than opening submissions to everyone, which meant tighter quality control but also a very specific dependency: when Adobe ended Flash support on 31 December 2020, the overwhelming majority of the Miniclip back catalogue became unplayable in a modern browser overnight. The site had already been pivoting toward mobile for years — it acquired the developer of 8 Ball Pool in 2012, a title that became its most durable franchise — but the Flash archive did not survive the transition in playable form.
Accounts, scores and a revenue share turned an upload into something a developer could invoice for.
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The losses were real. Games like Raft Wars, Commando 2 and Stunt Mania had no source code deposited anywhere, no emulation layer ready, and no preservation arrangement with institutions such as the Internet Archive or the Video Game History Foundation. BlueMaxima's Flashpoint project captured a significant portion of what was publicly accessible before the shutdown, and Ruffle — an open-source Flash emulator written in Rust — has made some of that material playable again without the original plugin, though compatibility remains incomplete.
Miniclip itself was acquired by the Chinese technology company Tencent in 2015, which signalled the direction the business had already chosen.
Miniclip itself was acquired by the Chinese technology company Tencent in 2015, which signalled the direction the business had already chosen. The catalogue that made it a destination is largely a record of what Flash could do before browsers decided it could not run.
The business model, storyboarded: sponsor mark, progress bar, then the game.
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