Flash is dead. Long live Ruffle!

April 4, 2022 on 5:36 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off on Flash is dead. Long live Ruffle!

On December 31, 2020, Adobe officially stopped supporting the Flash Player, and for the first time (ahem, second time) since we launched in 2002, Graffiti Archaeology went dark.

But the internet is proving to be full of surprises. A community of kindly Rust developers have created a Flash emulator called Ruffle, designed to “just work” on any Flash-based site, but founded on modern concepts of safety and security. It’s very much a work in progress, and they have not yet finished implementing all of Flash’s many capabilities, but it is really impressive how far they’ve come.

So, if you came here to try out our interactive app, but saw only a sad broken plugin icon, we have good news: you can still use it (albeit with some significant UI bugs) by installing the Ruffle extension in your browser of choice. Once the developers have worked out all the kinks, we’ll switch the site over to use Ruffle automatically (without requiring the extension).

In the meantime, here’s a video play-through of the original Flash version for posterity.