One was puzzle game where you had to bounce a laser off of mirrors to pop balloons. The second was kind of a Chip's Challenge kind of deal I think, where you as Dexter were running away from an out of control robot, and had to collect some computer chips or something.

And in the third game, Dexter was running, inexplicably, a record store? Dunno if it was a tie in for a specific episode I don't remember now, but it's quite a funny premise, and a fun game too.

If you worked on any of these games, thank you! I spent so many hours back then on those, and many others.

I still had dial up back then, and I couldn't stay online for long. Eventually I figured out that if I kept the website open, then disconnected (rather than closing then disconnecting, which was what my parents taught me), the games would still work. Which is obvious to me now, of course, but as a 6~7 year old, who had no idea of how any of this worked, I felt like an actual, proper hacker. I literally just had the thought, "wait, what if..." and was promptly rewarded. I've been chasing that high ever since :)

From then on, my evening routine after school was connecting, picking the 3~4 games I wanted to play for that night, letting them load, disconnecting, and playing to my heart's content. If I hacked anything that fateful night, it was my parent's main excuse to get me off the computer!

What a shame CN took their classic game sites down, when hosting flash games isn't even all that resource-intensive. An archive by them would've been nice. I recall every couple of years, older games slowly got removed which made me sad, until eventually flash died completely.

My goodness, I've come so far now in life. I know what tools to use to decompile flash games and look at the assets and logic, it's crazy to look back on how much games inspired me to learn about programming because I wanted to make my own.

To anyone who worked on these, thank you SO MUCH for having built them; you've definitely had a positive influence on countless people who were mentally stimulated and learned about how to use computers more in an effort to play them.

[1] https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dexter%27s_Laboratory:_Sci...

Since they were Shockwave based games they're not playable on modern browsers but they're playable with the Flashpoint Archive project. Huge timewaster, be careful. Better look for the games on YouTube :)

Gosh, what a nostalgia trip.

I think part of it also is that, games with the same scope of flash games are still being made, but they're being made for phones which is where the customers. Flash games were the perfect mobile game before mobile games existed.

But the magic was that flash games were created on the same machines they were made on, so curious players (often kids!) had a natural funnel in to dabbling with the creation side, so whole communities of creatives formed naturally.

I don't know how we can solve this disconnect between creation and consumption :( Sure there's many apps that let you build content from phones (swift playgrounds, other game-making apps, and now a whole gold rush of agentic prompting app-building apps...) but a phone is inherently non-immersive so I don't know how a creator can ever get into a flow state of building content on a phone itself.

But also we possibly just miss being teens on computers.

Someone already did it awhile back.

Someone already did it awhile back.

When I was eighteen, I went to Something Awful, Newgrounds, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, GameTrailers, Cinemassacre, YouTube, and SpoonyExperiment daily. Nowadays it's basically just YouTube for all that stuff (though I haven't watched Spoony for quite awhile).

Newgrounds is still around, I probably should make more of an effort to go there, and I do have stairs in my house, but I definitely don't go on as many different sites as I used to.

I certainly miss the days when everyone had their own web page.

Pizza City: https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/sear...

Cookie Party: https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/sear...

I learned a lot making these games while studying compsci. The platformer had a custom physics engine and I recall the pizza city open world was challenging to optimize for me at the time. Super fun to work on and appreciated the opportunity to work on these for PixelJam. These games were for comedy network and adult swim so in the same vein.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdaf8ehjuX4

And thanks for the game names as wel, although, I must admit that after posting that comment, I did go looking for them, and... Well, let's just say I've found my MixMaster skills to be quite rusty after all this time :p

Though that's an interesting point: some games were localized on the Brazilian CN website! Not all, but it's cool that at least some of them were.

What about the short term? Even edgy angst flash movies like Sallad fingers on Newgrounds is pretty cutsie by modern big tech standards.

I have unfortunately forgotten the gorillaz game though

https://old.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/yi02h2/who_remem...

https://homestarrunner.com/toons/backtoawebsite

You can play here: https://mattbruv.github.io/ccsr/

I don't know if it's nostalgia or what, but I still have fun playing it. Which can't be said for a lot of games.

It's fine if it's a bit sparse. Most people don't have a whole lot to publish on the internet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXR-bCF5dbM

Some games won't work if you try to play them outside of Flashpoint though: https://flashpointarchive.org/datahub/How_Flashpoint_Works

Can just grab them out of the cache once they've been downloaded, wherever they're stored.

Though it's more of a blog than anything else.

I might add some GeoCities web 1.0 junk to it at some point.

You must have one somewhere, you're chatting on HN with a modern SSL certificate.