A long time ago, flash games were all the rage, especially among school-aged children. Playable directly from a browser and with some of the most popular IP addresses around, and sometimes completely original, flash games were everything until they weren't when Adobe Flash disappeared and defeated hundreds of titles.
But in a surge of nostalgia and another hallmark of game preservation efforts, dozens of Cartoon Network flash titles have been revived and made playable again, thanks to the efforts of The Web Design Museum, a website dedicated to preserving “past trends in web design prevalent on the Internet from the creation of the first website in the 1920s through the mid-1920s.”
A total of 44 titles have been preserved, and they are completely free and playable from modern browsers. The titles range from Samurai Jack to The Powerpuff Girls, with Scooby-Doo, Ed, Edd n Eddy and Dexter's Laboratory in between.
Retro games can save me from modern game burnout
I have a retro gaming corner to play in now – save me from my modern microtransaction hell Louie the Kangaroo from Bomberman.
The timeline of these titles spans from 2001 (Scooby-Doo: Scooby Snapshopt) to the mid-2000s all the way to the end of Cartoon Network's browser endeavor in 2015 with a game based on The Amazing World of Gumball.
“Our goal is to preserve the creative legacy of millennial web designers for future generations, because internet users in 2030 will have no idea how unique the designs of 2003 websites were,” the site affirms in its “About Us” section.
If you spent hours on end on Cartoon Network's website, then this is a must
Overall, it's a pretty amazing effort. It's especially amazing how seamless it is to load up a game and play it as if you were back in the 21st century. Everything has been preserved exactly as it once was.
As someone who spent a lot of time on Cartoon Network's site, it was a trip down memory lane to go through each of these again. Some have stood the test of time, while others were certainly better in my head.
If you've never played any of these titles, there's no better time than now. Who knows, maybe flash games will make a comeback.
