Flashpoint Archive

Flashpoint Archive is a non-profit community effort to preserve games and animations (and all other digital interactive experiences) from the web.

Internet history and culture is important, and the web is evolving at such a rapid pace that what might be commonplace today could be obselete tomorrow. This project is dedicated to preserving as many experiences from these platforms as possible, so that they aren't lost to time. Since December 2017, over 170,000 games and animations have been preserved across more than a hundred browser plugins and web technologies.

In addition to our preservation efforts, we also provide a highly flexible software package for reliable navigation and playback of preserved content. Among the software that powers the archive is a fully-featured launcher, a proxy that tricks games into thinking they're running on the live web, and a sandbox that allows for secure playback of plugin-enabled content - all of which are open-source software.

The project was originally started by BlueMaxima in an attempt to outrun the disappearance of webgames prior to the death of Flash. It has since evolved into a major undertaking involving hundreds of community contributors from around the world, encompassing both games and animations created for numerous internet plugins, frameworks, and standards.

For years, this project has been financed from our pockets (specifically from Dominik). However, it piles up over the years and I was not able to afford it any more. We did a one-time fundraiser to cover the personal costs, and to pay for the future costs of running this project. But it's been a while and we're running out of money again, so here we are. This project cannot function without a decently powerful server with a lot of storage space, used both for serving the archive to our users, and for all the internal storage for submissions, webscrapes and other many storage- and compute-intensive services that we run in the background in order to make this project manageable. The current mix of two cheaper servers costs us in total over 60 euro per month, but we would love to upgrade to a unified beefy machine that costs 120 euro per month, which would satisfy our needs for the foreseeable future.

Excluding releases, the project's internals are currently about 15TB of active data, and about 100TB of cold storage of various webscrapes and other things. We currently rely on shared "unlimited" storage accounts of the big cloud providers to store these data, but this might change in the future, and might cost more money.

You can donate any amount of money, starting from two Euros. There are no subscription tiers or rewards, your only reward for donating is that the project will keep running for a little longer. (If you'd like a snazzy little badge in our Discord server, contact a staff member with proof of donation)

Here are some Flashpoint-related services and tools that we've made and use:

Our primary social platform is Discord, click here to join.

We respect IP owners' rights and remove games when requested, as quickly as possible. You can contact us here.