Not long ago, flash games were all the rage, especially among school-aged children. Playable directly from the browser and featuring some of the most popular IPs around, and sometimes completely original, Flash games were everything until they went Adobe Flash, winning hundreds of titles.
However, as another feature of vintage and game preservation efforts, dozens of Cartoon Network Flash titles have been revived and made playable once again, thanks to the efforts of the Web Design Museum, a site dedicated to preserving “past trends in web design that have prevailed on the Internet since the creation of the first website in 1902020190”.
In all, 44 titles have been saved, and they are completely free and playable from modern browsers. Titles range from Samurai Jack to The Powerpuff Girls, Scooby-Doo, Ed, Ed n Eddy and Dexter's Laboratory.
Retro games can save me from modern gaming burnout
I have a retro game corner to play now – save me from my modern microtransaction hell, Bomberman's Kangaroo Louie.
The timeline for these titles spans from 2001 (Scooby-Doo: Scooby Snapshopt) to the mid-2000s to the end of Cartoon Network's browser effort 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 little idea how unique the design of 2003 websites was,” the site affirms in its “About Us” section.
If you've spent hours on end at Cartoon Network's site, then this is a must
Overall, this is an amazing effort. It's especially amazing how easy it is to load up the game and play as if you were back in the 2000s. Everything is preserved as before.
As someone who spends a lot of time on Cartoon Network's site, it was once again a trip down memory lane going through each of these. Some have stood the test of time, while others were definitely better in my mind.
If you haven't played any of these titles, there's no better time than now. Who knows, maybe flash games will make a comeback.
