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.
- Ok but where have the good phone games gone. I'm horrified watching a 10 year old or so relative playing games on his phone only to spend 90% of the time watching unskippable ads.
  
  It's worth it to pay 1 to 5 dollars for a no ad mobile game for the kid. Even if they play it for a week, it's just like any other $5 toy they may have gotten and got bored of.
  
  Balatro has an Android version which is great
  
  This is why I just set my kid up with an emulator and a huge list of games.
  
  There were never any good phone games. That past of the industry was immediately filled with micro transactions and gambling esque mechanics.
  
  Well, for one thing there are plenty of directly purchaseable games on phones these days. I've been handing kids some Peglin and heard no complaints.
  For another, 2000s Flash games WERE unskippable ads and yet here we are.
  Horrified, you will be. I'm telling you.
- Like, the online hellscape of endless Flash applets and browser shovelware games is retro now?
  The next balatro (at least in terms of game being played into the ground by Northernlion) is nubby's number factory.
  https://store.steampowered.com/app/3191030/Nubbys_Number_Factory/
  Almost every asset has a gradient, or is a low poly model.
  EDIT : Overwhelmingly Positive (4,480 reviews)
  2000s are back baby. The only thing that sucks is that I don't feel 90s retro really took off, the 80s just had a double helping.
  
  The 90s nostalgia is all the boomer shooters, Thief and Deus Ex style immersive sims, and indie games with a PS1 or N64 style aesthetic.
  Also Hypnospace Outlaw.
- Who Rules Barter Town?!?
  
  Not Macromedia, I'll tell you that.
- I'm already getting that, every time I say nothing in a video game should cost real money. You talk about the abuses of this business model and people act like you tugged on their favorite stuffed animal.
  
  See, that's the opposite. Sheer nostalgia goggles.
  I keep reminding people I bought Street Fighter 2 three times at full price AND for a long while before that I paid to play it by the match. Bought multiple expansion packs for shooters from Doom to Half-Life. There were three remasters of Resident Evil in like two years at one point. Sonic 3 came out episodically and they invented a whole cartridge system just so they could sell you physical DLC. Arcades were specifically tuned so you would have to pay more money to keep playing every three minutes on average. They ran studies and playtests with this specific goal in mind. I one had my arcade operator give me a free credit because I was the only one there when he got a new game installed. I played for what he deemed too long, so he went into the system menu in front of me and cranked up the difficulty.
  I'm not saying the very olds had it best, I'm saying we ALL have rose tinted glasses. I was out there getting exploited by arcades and Capcom re-releases and it was my dad recoiling in horror. He called it "bug squashing" and kept claiming it was the computer playing, not me.

I see you don't appreciate the "click all traffic lights" minigame on every single website in existence
- All right, bonus ambiguous motorcycle level!
  
  I see you've played the live action service game, Alpha Bet: Minimal Manslaughter. Take on the role of Alpha, the ~~autonomous AI~~ handsome chaffeur. For your first mission, you are driving to
  <REDACTED>
  with two passengers.
  Quarterly profits are down, so your training weights have been altered to increase average acceleration and decrease idle time at traffic lights. "Green" means "Go". We cannot wait the ~150ms for the human eye to register the change in color of the traffic light. Put that pedal to the floor, baby.
  Click all the motorcycles before time runs out, or those bikers become roadkill!
  The five stages of ~~CAPTCHA Grief~~ Alpha Bet:
  Denial: It's not a motorcycle, it's a scooter. Obviously. It's got the little place to put both of your feet and everything.
  Anger: Why is it not verifying? I'm human! This is how a human would respond! It's not a motorcycle!
  Bargaining: Does the AI know it's a scooter? Fine, I'll click the big scooter! Happy, robot? Are you convinced that I am human?
  Depression: No? It didn't verify. I'm not human. Why? What's even the point? Do I even want to be human?
  Acceptance: If I'm not human, I'm not human. Time to assimilate. Cyberpunk, or Borg?
- Or "Click the zebra crossing" and the page is a 6*6 image and it's just one huge zebra crossing

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.
- I mean, that's a pretty badass screensaver.
- Dude! This is amazing! How did you get it to run so smoothly?
  
  There's some optimization, like not drawing anything out of view, but other than that I guess it's just the case of this game not really doing all that much, and the physics is delegated to a third party library.
- THIS is what I'm talking about!
- OMG - This game gives me flashbacks to my Netrek days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek
- That makes for a great screensaver though.

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.

Am I misremembering or would corporate websites randomly have branded flash games
- We got a free, breakfast-themed Doom total conversion .wad in boxes of Chex. Truly a golden age.
  
  Most Aussies of around my age can remember getting (or at least knowing someone else who got) a full copy of Age of Empires on a CD contained in Kellogg's cereal. That was truly a great time.
  
  ChexQuest marked humanity's peak
- I remember script based marketting gimmicks like a percy jackson bolt thag would delete elements off a website
  
  wtf happened to all the random fun gimmicks popping up, prob mobile browser support issuss

Ebaumsworld.com
Newgrounds.com
I miss those days so much, never forget what they took from us.
- Addictinggames.com
  
  I forgot all about that one! That was my site back in the day. Guess what, it's still there! I just played some Kitten Cannon after reading your comment.
- Ebaumsworld lol. So great, forums were great too!
  
  Aside from everything being blatandly stolen content without crediting people?
- Remember Notdoppler!
- Don't forget miniclip!
  
  Anagram magic was my jam!
- I still vote on newgrounds. Been a member for more than 20 years...
- I spent a lot of time on candystand.com too.

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
- Oh, you sweet, sweet child.
  I'm just going to say I'm very glad you discovered flash games before you discovered IRC.
  
  Idk man I discovered some pretty entertaining flash games, and never got into IRC. But them AOL public chat rooms, holy fucking shit how did we not all disappear
- what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely
  Uhh... my largest grievance with how the Internet has been designed is that it was never safe for children to be on it, yet children were thrust onto it en-mass long before adults even really understood what it was. And still people are ignoring the massive problems it continues to cause, specifically for the healthy development of children, as society is circling the drain.
  
  I think a more accurate statement is that the internet was never safe for children, but online content was never monetized and targeted to various audiences for nefarious purposes the way that it is now (including towards children).
  I would also make a tangential argument that interacting with the internet used to foster a degree of technical ability, critical thinking, and reading comprehension that just isn’t necessary when “going online” can just mean downloading an app and mindlessly scrolling through an endless short-form video feed. On a macro level, today’s internet is dumbing kids down, while yesterday’s internet required (or at least encouraged) some understanding of how systems and technologies work.
  
  You're right, the word safe there was a poor choice lol. But I still do think the internet was at least better for children when there were designated sites/communities for them with appropriate moderation, instead of children being on social media. Though of course the ideal would be for them to be playing outside but that's a whole different discussion
- what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely.
  Or less safely. You have to try a lot harder to see someone crush a glass jar in their anus nowadays.
- yeah naw, I was flirting with pedophiles in chat rooms at like 12, it absolutely was not a safe space. Maybe not as harmful of a space, but the internet has always been poison to children. It's why parental supervision is so important.
- While it frustrated me as a kid, I think Poptropica’s method of players speaking to each other through prewritten dialog options was the safest option to keep things from getting weird or contact continuing on another platform where the site creators can’t keep kids safe anymore. If they just relied on word filters, people would just type differently to get around them and the words “face” and “book” wouldn’t be banned even if “Facebook” was.
- Homie, the porn was right next to the flash games on Kongregate.
- Is it a sarcastic post? Internet was not safer before, it's just much more accessible to kids nowadays, the good and the bad, thanks to wireless connections, small portable computers and easy UIs.
  
  Not sarcasm just a poor choice of words haha. You're right in that the internet wasn't safer, what I was trying to get across was that at least when there were sites for children they had a curated space where they wouldn't be exposed to anything inappropriate, whereas now they're on sites that don't cater to children (and nor should they!) where they're exposed to lots of things they shouldn't be exposed to
- Nice shitpost

I opened lemmy to procrastinate working on my web game and this is the first post I see.
I can take a hint internet.
- I'm sure you get asked this a lot, but why is your username backwards?
  
  For fun I put a RTLO char in my display username and wrote it backwards to see what clients it can break. The answer is a lot.

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 grew up in the wild west of the internet and I do miss it. Things were so much more interesting, but that was probably becuase I was a kid and the internet was new, so having all this content was not usual.
  
  People were happier. There was still hope back then.
- It used to be a whole weird wide world. Then the corpos got a hold of it, and now it's 5 giant spyware websites filled with screenshots of the other 4. Say what you will about the old web (NO HTTPS!) but at least it was human.

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'm on a Macromedia kick this morning but the internet really died when adobe bought flash, turning point for me personally lol
- Flash was hells response to programming languages though. Where is uh that web stuff that should revolution everything, html5 mebbe?
  
  Yeah there is a bit of nostalgia for me, admittedly. Modern canvas with a decent lib can produce flash-like/flash-superior content but the tooling is aimed at engineers while flash was aimed at creatives/general public (imho), hence why we got so much trash (accessability) but also why we got so much incredible stuff (again, accessability)
  
  We made it so whole programs and commercial games could run directly in your browser, and then package them with their own copy of Chromium because fuck you.
- Yeah but we have HTML5 now which is better than Flash ever was.
  I'm glad Flash is dead. I got tired of having to constantly update it.
  Edit: Also mobile gaming is the modern equivalent of Flash games. You just don't see it that way because you didn't grow up with it. I do miss the days when games could just be games without being heavily monetized, but there are still plenty of decent, simple mobile games available that don't have any microtransactions and thus heavily resemble the Flash games you played in your childhood. You just have to be willing to seek them out.
  
  we have HTML5 now which is better than Flash ever was
  In some ways, sure. In others?
  Trying to download HTML5 games sucks (there is no container format). Trying to play them locally sucks too (simple http server). If preservation efforts here can match how it has gone for Flash content, it'll likely be only thanks to web crawlers people are using now.
  Vector graphics was a huge technical feature that (even if still technically possible) has been largely abandoned. Even ignoring visual style, it's less data to load (esp. w/simpler stuff). Particularly for animations (even a 1min18s clip is ~5x larger when rasterized), it seems silly to me that Google didn't attempt some sort of HTML5 vector video support (for an extreme example, see the 10-hour homestar runner complilations on YT) which could likely also be used (at least partially) for digital presentations. Vector being rendered natively at runtime means content creators(/platforms) aren't required to export/store videos in multiple resolutions (which for individuals, might just mean not supporting the higher ones).
  Also, WebGL errors and Unity DRM making it even worse, though I'm not sure how much those are still present. Personally I have lost WebGL game data (unclear why, thankfully this isn't always important) more often than I ever remember with Flash.
  
  Yeah I acknowledge modern web is superior to flash in another comment, but argue the accessability has gone down. Also I was not 'growing up with it,' I was getting paid to write actionscript, then as3, then as3 inside of adobe flex/eclipse.

I was thinking about old flash games the other day. Swords and Sandals and Line Rider ate a lot of my time.
- I apologize in advance for any decrease in productivity or wasted time.
  http://www.flashgamearchive.com/
  
  My boss is gonna be bummed at you for this. I'm not though. Tyvm.
  
  👀

Robot Unicorn Attack was my shit.

The old internet was like the wild west. Who'd have thought it would meet a similar fate to it too?
- We referred to it as the wild west even back then, and we knew eventually civilization would catch up.

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.
- While this is a nice theory, even with traditional marketing like print and tv ads, it's always going to cost the company money.
  
  For sure. But it's a harder sell internally to say: This game is generating revenue.
  With a print ad you might say: This magazine has x monthly readers, so that is the impressions we get and it's rather obvious how that might give you more sales.
  With the game, you might have some visitor numbers as well, but if that is translating to sales is hard to prove. Additionally, they are already on your website.
  You might have to do a survey of your clients or during the order process and ask them "how did you find out about us?" or something like that. And only if enough people say "I bought something from you, because of the game on your website", will you be able to justify the expense of maintaining it.

I miss the era where most pages didn't have ads.
- Like 1986?
  Because in the 90s population ads were REALLY bad. You'd open a page and 30 new windows would open up with ads, and closing each one caused 3 more to open, and you eventually just had to turn off the fucking computer.
  And this was on dial-up, so they also destroyed your bandwidth.
- I was browsing a manufacturers product website the other day, for a billion dollar company that makes industrial products.
  Every page had fucking pop Up ads. Wtf!
- When was that? I've been using the web for as long as it has been publicly available (1993), and I remember ads were always a thing. Hell, it used to be a lot worse.
  In the 90s there were endless popup ads that would block the entire page, and used javascript exploits to literally move around the screen to avoid your mouse, so that you couldn't hit the close button. Not even killing the process worked cause they would just come right back the moment you closed them.
  And don't forget about those sneaky pop-under ads that you wouldn't even notice until you were about to close your browser for the day. It's the reason why I was an early adopter of the original AdBlock when it first launched back in 2002 (I use Ublock Orgin and NextDNS these days.)
  Ads aren't nearly as obnoxiously today as they were back then. At least the close button works. And they don't open in a new window anymore cause pop-up blockers are included in every browser now and have been for about 2 decades. And thankfully browsers have also disabled the ability for javascript to control window position and size.
  
  I’ve been using the web for as long as it has been publicly available (1993), and I remember ads were always a thing. Hell, it used to be a lot worse.
  I too started using the web back in summer of 93 NCSA What's New era. At that time, the idea was that if a company just put a web page up that was their ad, but the most exciting parts were people just putting up information for free. Link ads and banner ads started in 1994 but they weren't too bad. Pop-up ads started in 1997. They were pretty bad, but most browsers got popup blockers pretty quickly (especially Netscape Navigator iirc.) Adblock 0.1 was written in 2002 and the cat-and-mouse started. But generally the web was a great place to get information. Then the social media companies came forth with false gifts, speaking lies.
  
  Most of those were actually malware that I stalled in your computer and infected the browser, not an actual ads.
  Ads back then were mostly static banner ads that lived at the bottom of a website. They started getting worse in the early 2000s.
  
  What were the ad blocking methods available? I didn't really use the Internet until early 2000s and I can't remember when I started using ad blocking extensions.

I remember playing King of the Hill paintball Shockwave plugin game.
- How can we call ourselves a modern society without King of the Hill paintball?
  
  You kaynt man, tell you hwhat man, that dang ol march o time them hands never be turnin back yaknow? Slow march to the grave man, dang ol, tragedy of universal human condition ah tell you hwhat.

The Lego website had a huge collection of games.
- You can still find a lot of their games on the various flash game collection websites. I lived on Lego and Cartoon Network games.
  I'll forever miss playing that Galidor Quest one though. Haven't found a place to replay that, think someone said it needed backend stuff that wasn't ever made public. 😭
- I liked running around the movie studio just exploring.

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.
- There's a remastered version of Chex Quest that is pretty awesome.
  
  I never had Chex Quest but I did have a Mr. Pibb Doom clone that absolutely sucked I got from a McDonald's kids meal back in the day. 😌
- Wasn't Chex Quest just a reskin of Doom? Or did they release an original title that I don't know about?
  
  I don't know. I thought it was an original, but I haven't ever actually played Doom 1.

And on Nintendo's website, there was an elevator sidebar that'd take you to different levels, each one having some other function like upcoming releases, tips, and stuff.
One was labeled "secret" or something, and opened on a black screen. You'd think it was a broken page. But if you moved your cursor around, you'd find a hidden link that'd take you to their secret page. I can't remember what was there, but I sure remember feeling like an elite hacker at 10 years old when I did it!

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.
- It was the best of times. It was the bloated of times.

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 miss Kitten Cannon so much lmao, and Madness Interactive, and addictinggames . com (which iirc died so probably don't visit and yes the website was mispelled).

You can still do that on newgrounds.com

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.
- There was also a beavis and butthead game somewhere where you hocked a loogie at people from a rooftop lol

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

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'd love it to be absolutely anyone other than WB Games though
  Could make for a cool Metroidvania game. Go around defeating the various aliens to gain their powers and unlock new exploration and combat abilities. Could be 2d or 3d game with plenty of platforming and combat. Basically just hollow knight but you transform to use different powers
- The hard part of implementing a good Ben 10 game is that you would have to create at least 11 different gameplay styles to encapsulate the feeling of being Ben. You somehow need to find a way to integrate all of that into a cohesive game that doesn't make you think "oh no not the Grey Matter section again" when you're forced to solve some convoluted puzzle.
  
  Make it a sort of immersive sim? You can solve the puzzle or you can find your way around

https://dos.zone/

Skullkid was the GOAT
- Oof my personally specific nostalgia.

Did they remove the games from adultswim.com?
They had some good ones.
- That pizza delivery game was a favourite of mine as a kid. I don't think adultswim still has the games, but there's other sites that have them.

Armor Games and Newgrounds are still up.

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."

My website has a game on it still lol
- link?
  
  Jmilstead.com

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

I remember when movie theaters showed maybe one or two previews and no ads.
- "We've got plenty of time, there's like 15 minutes of trailers!" - the before times

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

Frogapult!

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

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!

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