History of Free Games from an Old Game Developer
Well, relatively old that is… Online game portals, that is what they might be called back in the late 1990s.They were an oddity of the early internet. What made gaming possible on the internet during the early days was the Macromedia Flash Player. It was a browser plugin designed to allow animators to create dynamic pages during a time when websites were mostly static collections of text and images.
Flash games littered the internet, often with dark undertones as their creators shared their experiences good and bad through their work of creating games. The games were mostly single player and used animation heavily. The fast development spawned new genres not possible before like stick-man games and point and click games. Over the decades, the game development led to hundreds of thousands of games being made, and they were mostly free to play supported by ads.
In the past, we’ve seen a lot of browser plugins come and go. Flash was the most notable of them all. However, web browsers do most of the heavy lifting now. With one notable exception being the Unity3d game engine. That platform has adapted fast enough to still exist in an open format called WebGL. There is also another open standard used to develop modern web games and it’s called HTML5. Although the technology behind the web games renaissance has changed a lot, the games remain popular.
