No Cameras Allowed by Computer Clan #007 - RIP Adobe Flash Player (Let’s Get Nostalgic) Show Notes: Watch Krazy Ken’s Adobe Flash Player Retrospective Quick How-To: Playing Flash Content with Flashpoint The First Flash Cartoon I Saw: Newgrounds Link (Ruffle Player) Unofficial YouTube Upload (Higher-Quality Audio) Song By: KOMP-FM | Animation By: cards-n-toons Patreon.com/KrazyKen Transcription*: Hey guys, how are you all doing? If you're new here, welcome. My name is Krazy Ken, and welcome back to another episode of No Cameras Allowed the autobiographical story about my journey on YouTube hosting the Computer Clan YouTube channel. And you know, I've had a lot of fun along the way. So I have some cool stories to tell and some cool lessons to talk about a bed. It's been a lot of fun. The last couple of episodes have had guests on them, but I'm just back to my old self alone, 10 stories underground in my lair. Actually, that's not true. This is more of the behind the scenes story of everything. So I got to ruin the magic. I'm sorry, I'm not 10 stories underground. I'm in a studio somewhere. I'm actually in the office. Part of my studio, right? Edit all of the videos. I do like to record the podcast in here too, because it's smaller and easier to treat acoustically. Hey, so what are we talking about today? Well, Adobe Flash player recently went EOL—end-of-life. Meaning Adobe is not pushing software updates or security patches or hosting support for it any more. And it also is getting blocked everywhere. So because of security problems, Adobe is highly recommending people on install it and to reduce security problems. They're blocking it now. I'm sure there's ways around it to make it still work, to make the plugins still work. There's archived Flash content. So not all is lost, but still it's kind of a historic moment because Flash player was a huge staple in the internet and in pop culture. And now we're saying goodbye to it. Well, we've been saying goodbye to it for a while. So a little while ago, a couple of weeks ago, I released a retrospective about Adobe Flash Player's history. It's in the show notes and the links. I highly recommend watching it if you haven't watched it yet. So this episode is about the making of that crazy Ken episode and just about some Adobe Flash nostalgia in general, with my journey and experience with it. So yes, for years, Adobe has been saying, it's going to die at the end of 2020, and now it has so definitely check out that retrospective, if you haven't seen it yet, we're also going to talk about Shockwave because it was similar and Adobe owned them as well. Let's uh, go back to the beginning quick. Uh, actually first I want to talk about flashpoint because if you want to still play a bunch of archive, Flash games and animations and Shockwave games and all that stuff, uh, download Flashpoint, it's a windows app and you can play all that stuff in there. They have like 80,000 titles. So go have fun with that. Um, I know I have been having some fun with that lately. So just to kind of like a brief history here, future wave incorporated was founded by Charlie Jackson and Jonathan Gay. Charlie Jackson was the founder of Silicon beach and they made a lot of software back in the day. And then he founded this future wave company with John and their first product was smart sketch. It was a vector-based drawing, which means it uses math to draw shapes. It's not, you know, pictures, it's actual math that draws the shapes and they made it for the pinpoint of West, which ran on pen based tablet, computers, and all that stuff. But that stuff didn't take off in the nineties. So the smart sketch wasn't really used. I think don't quote me on this, but I think if I remember correctly from Charlie's blog, he said they may be sold two copies of the software either way. It didn't really go anywhere. So they added frame-by-frame animation features into it and they released it on Mac and windows that updated version, and they called it FutureSplash. So now it was running on Mac and windows, two very big platforms compared to pen input computers, of course, and it had more features. So that's pretty fricking cool. Uh, but you know, the company still wasn't doing too well, they needed to sell the technology and, you know, try to be under a bigger company and make this work. So they looked at a bunch of companies, well, I don't know how many, but I know they looked at Adobe and Adobe initially turned them down, but Macromedia was like, ah, yes, we'll buy them. So Macromedia bought FutureSplash. They renamed it Macromedia Flash and boom. They're off to the races. And then later Adobe sees how successful it is. And then Adobe buys Macromedia media for like $3.6 billion. And that's how FutureSplash became Macromedia Flash and then Adobe Flash. So that's kind of the quick and dirty history there. But yeah, I just think it's funny how like Adobe initially didn't buy the technology, but then they did when they saw how big Macromedia made it, Flash content was everywhere. And Macromedia also had Shockwave, which was big on CDs as well. And Flash was just spreading on the web with like websites and games on the web and animations because you could use it for interactives. You can use it for video, so many things and it was spreading and then yeah, there'll be bottom and just kept pushing it. And well, of course now it's dead. But I remember back when we had the family computer, we had a Mac for a good chunk of time. And then we switched to a windows PC for, I think about seven years. And my first experience with Adobe Flash player was on windows. And I don't remember, maybe I don't exactly remember what the first thing I did in Flash was, but I do remember quite vividly for some stupid reason. The first cartoon, the first Flash cartoon that I saw on the web. So my father had his friend over and his friend's son also came over and they showed my father this animation. I think it was called like Osama bin Ladin, nowhere to run. And you know, this was back when he was still alive, you know, I'm not going to get political, but it was like a little animation of like Osama bin Ladin, like dodging bombs. And it was like a little song and like George Bush was playing like a conga drum. It was, I vaguely remember that being the first Flash cartoon I saw [inaudible] [inaudible] I was like, when I was researching this episode for YouTube, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't having a fever dream or something. So like I looked it up in flashpoint and sure enough, this was a real thing. Um, let me Google it right here. Let's see. Osama bin Ladin, nowhere to run cartoon. I think you could probably just watch it on YouTube. Yeah, it looks like it's just on YouTube under bin Ladin, nowhere to run or nowhere to run Flash video and you can just play it on YouTube uploaded in 2007. Oh my gosh. I remember that being the first Flash thing I saw. And then I started getting into some Shockwave stuff. Again, I know Shockwave is different than Flash, but they were both owned by Macromedia and they both did similar things, right. They both had their own sets of offering tools that you would use to make the stuff, but you know, they were still similar. Um, so one of the earliest Shockwave experiences I can recall was candy stand.com. So candy stand was a bunch of free games to help market Wrigley products, you know, gum and lifesavers and the trolley brand and all that stuff. So when I was a kid, my brother and I, and uh, my father's friend's son, well, they introduced us to this stuff and it was really cool. Cause like at the time I was so used to having to put a CD into my computer to play a game. Right. But they were like, Oh no, you just go to this website and you can play these games. And I was like, Holy crap, this is fricking cool. I spent a lot of time playing Shockwave games. And the first games I remember playing were these golf games. So you could just golf in these like candy themed environments. And yet this stuff is on flashpoint is so cool. I actually showed a little clip in my crazy Ken episode. I got a hole in one. I still got it. But yeah, I played those golf games like crazy. And it was so much fun playing that stuff. And it was like magical back then. It's still kind of cool now, but it's crazy how like, some things have an aged, well, like the 256 color, it's all desert and stuff, but Hey, it's nostalgic, whatever.