I miss the era of the internet with random games on every website

We used to get video games in the captain crunch box or in exchange for tokens on the crunch boxes or something to that effect... anyway that was essentially just a flash game but equally if not more interested. Got a lot of mileage out of that crunchwrare game in the 90s

Oh, wow, we're there now?

Like, the online hellscape of endless Flash applets and browser shovelware games is retro now?

You get what that means, right? In twenty years you GenZ Tumblr nerds will be in some online forum recoiling in horror at some kid waxing nostalgic about back when you could just play a free gacha game full of anime waifus and where have all the good phone games gone?

It's happening and you're not ready.

Well, either that or Thunderdome. We'll see.

I see you don't appreciate the "click all traffic lights" minigame on every single website in existence

I actually made a random game you can play without login or tracking or anything. Dunno if it's any fun, though 🤔

And you need a keyboard to play. Otherwise it's just a screensaver.

https://nailbar.io/proj/miniduel3/

Sorry about the plug, but I am kinda proud of it.

For me, it’s the fact that every god damned program I want to use requires a fucking subscription.

Shout out to fucking Blender and GIMP and InkScape. They’re really keeping shit cool.

So sick of this “pay to play” structure we now have on EVERYTHING.

Issues with Flash and the actual quality of those games aside, what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely. There's no spaces for children on the internet anymore and I think that's really sad, nine year old should be playing Hannah Montana dress-up not get eating disorders from TikTok influencers

Edit for clarity: I didn't mean to come off as though I think the internet was ever safe for unsupervised children because that's not what I believe. What I was trying to say is that the loss of spaces made for children, with adequate content curation and moderation, pushed children on social media which is awful for them

Ebaumsworld.com

Newgrounds.com

I miss those days so much, never forget what they took from us.

Am I misremembering or would corporate websites randomly have branded flash games

Yeah, I miss it in some ways, too. It was more of the Wild West of internet.

I would argue today's internet is fully optimized for control over people (when desired) & profitability. Unless there's some Earth-shattering backlash where idk people kill all ads & they purchase NOTHING online unless they very specifically search for it....this is the internet, perfected. The internet is free, our attention & wallets are the product. Traded, tracked, bought, and sold.

I opened lemmy to procrastinate working on my web game and this is the first post I see.

I can take a hint internet.

Itch.io game devs unite! There's still hope. I miss Ebaumsworld, New grounds and Miniclip too but I think there a small part of the Internet that still has this charm.

Here's my game dev contribution:

What's in my sanga?

I was thinking about old flash games the other day. Swords and Sandals and Line Rider ate a lot of my time.

I'm on a Macromedia kick this morning but the internet really died when adobe bought flash, turning point for me personally lol

The old internet was like the wild west. Who'd have thought it would meet a similar fate to it too?

What "not leaving money on the table" does to a mf

I've been inside a few big companies and I've seen exactly how it works.

In order to manage huge organisations, they divide them all up into cost centers. And the website is considered marketing so it gets given a budget on the theory that it brings customers. It uses the budget to make games and it does indeed bring customers.

Then a few years later, the shareholders are asking why their stock hasn't outperformed the market, and they put in a CEO tasked with fixing it, and the CEO asks the head of the department in charge of websites what can he do to address the fact that his department is losing money instead of making it.

Robot Unicorn Attack was my shit.

I remember playing King of the Hill paintball Shockwave plugin game.

The Lego website had a huge collection of games.

I loved their Dexter's lab Flash game back in the days. CN and Nick lost their charm

Lifesavers had a bowling game on their site that was actually a ton of fun and decent quality. All the balls were patterned to look like their candy, but still. It was free and that's where the advertisements ended.

It was a fair trade.

Edit: This might've actually been creamsavers, not lifesavers. It was back in 2002.

itch.io, sort by free browser games

I remember when Chex and Dominoes put out games that were better than they had any right being. Chex even gave it away for free.

I doubt this will be the catalyst for social change, but I agree. The idea that society owes nothing to the average person, but ownership class members are entitled to public resources, is exactly what will cause heads to roll, if we get to that point. This is a silly little microcosm of that situation, and I do miss those days.

I'm sympathetic to the "Why does everything have to require a fucking login?"

But come on. So many of those games were just inferior reskins of classics. If you want to play Pac-Man, then play Pac-Man. You don't need to go to Lays.com and play Cheeto Crunchers, where a giant Chester Cheetah floating head chases snack foods through a maze.

That was back when every site wanted you to install a toolbar that was spyware.

You can still do that on newgrounds.com

I remember seeing that game with the hammer and pot and not believing it was a flash game and that people paid for it.

The Ed Edd and Eddy game where you used machine puzzle pieces to put a jawbraker into a bucket was my game as a kid.

https://dos.zone/

Still waiting for the resurgence of Ben 10. I feel like WB games would have made a standalone game a la arkham by now if it wasn't so mismanaged

I remember pure website games too. There was some alien one where you had a certain amount of energy to use for the day. You could work out, attack other aliens or a few other things. Didn't cost anything to play. It was hard starting out because higher level guys could attack you. I remember putting a note: "please stop attacking me." One person attacked and said: "no."

To an extent this still exist, but instead of flash games its now html5 games

Skullkid was the GOAT

ugh I remember the Cartoon network resort and despite everything it was amazing

My website has a game on it still lol

Did anybody else play Kids Next Door Fusion Fall?

Friv.com has a simple UI that's fairly kid safe. Just throw /old at the end of the URL to get the better, older UI. The new one is kinda meh. Friv doesn't have a lot of games, but enough to keep you entertained for a while every now and then. Its' biggest strength was always the simple UI. No accounts, comments, ratings, anything. Only games.

I love that Ruffle exists, it makes so many of these good old flash games sites great again!

Frogapult!

Did anyone else play the dungeons-and-dragons-esque text based game on the Eragon website?

I mean all those in browser games required shockwave, flash, or java which basically was malware but we didn’t know better then