Adobe Flash's End of Life

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - You fixed your last faucet you revolutionary pipesqueak!

You know, this is NOT supposed to be “beloved old things are dying” week, but yesterday we wrote about MS Paint being deprecated.

Today, Adobe announced that Flash, once a bedrock of the Internet, will no longer be supported by 2020, and has set Flash to an end-of-life death journey. Adobe has specified this applies to Adobe Flash Player, and not other things using the Flash runtime, such as Adobe AIR. That's particularly important to us at KoopaTV right now on a game development basis.

RIP Flash, 1995–2020.
(Image made in Paint. Gotta use it as much as I can!)

Flash is already the butt of the Internet, with HTML5 being the new standard-bearer. Mozilla Firefox regularly puts warning messages about Flash content on the Internet. I'd know. We'd all know that Flash would be killed off pretty soon, making this less sudden and scary than the Paint situation and a lot more like Miiverse's end-of-life. (By the way, as a result of our article last night, Microsoft is making a modification to Paint's fate!)

While 2020 is a long time away, I've recently (before today) been reminiscing about the older times on the Internet, back when Newgrounds content creators were Internet celebrities and YouTube was a much smaller competitor for Internet domination, rather than a mega behemoth. The world was a better place then. George W. Bush was president, and videogame-based music videos like these three have mostly withstood the test of time and are still better than the majority of the garbage on YouTube by content creators today:

Rawest Forest

The animation to the music is made by 2000s-era Internet celebrity Kirbopher, while the actual lyrics were by a dude named Martin Hagwell. Rawest Forest is what many people's overall concept of Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars was. You take the best song from Super Mario RPG (Forest Maze, otherwise known as Beware the Forest's Mushrooms) and then make it seem like the whole game is like that, and put lyrics to it. For YEARS, this song, along with the Internet's overall love for the character Geno, was pretty much all I knew about Super Mario RPG. I assumed it was this amazing cult classic game. Finally, on Labor Day weekend 2008, it was released for the Wii's Virtual Console. And... it turned out that Forest Maze really was the best part of the game, and the rest of it was overrated.

At least the song is still a classic!

Ignorance is Bliss

My personal favourite of the songs in this article, it's Ignorance is Bliss! This is actually a very old, officially-licensed Nintendo song by the long-dead band Jellyfish, back in the 1991 compilation album Nintendo: White Knuckle Scorin'. Unfortunately, it's no longer available on Newgrounds (it was animated by a lad named Brandon Clark), but here is a mirror of the Flash video on YouTube.

The basis of the song, its movie video, and the included comic in the album is that King Bowser Koopa has taken over an oil field and is going to be a part of an oil cartel for big-league profits. Princess Peach doubts the Koopa's ability to pull that off because she's a bully, but hey, she's the one that's gotten kidnapped so it's not like she's a genius. Unfortunately, those jerk plumbers go and rescue her anyway.

It's a bad ending, but a great song!

Link! He Come To Town!

I guess here are some things to note. One, the song was sung by the band The Rabbit Joint in 1998, specifically a guy named Joe Pleiman. The original Flash video of the song came in 2001 by a guy named Josh Spaulding, and then various people made music videos of it after.

One of the Internet's first instances of FAKE NEWS was that the music group System of a Down (an actually really famous band, though for the past two decades this story is the only thing I know them for) was responsible for the song. They weren't. Apparently, that impression was created through the peer-to-peer music pirating sites (like Napster, which has a Miiverse community for some reason) that existed back then. Something about SOAD being in the file name. You know, FAKE NEWS was actually more dangerous back in the early 2000s. There was a lack of resources you could trust (such as KoopaTV), and people actually forwarded chain e-mails to one another instead of deleting them on the spot. ALL of the songs in this article have some urban legends attached to them if you look.

The song was already a classic pre-Flash video, being the 22nd remix on OC ReMix posted in 2000. Link! He Come To Town! (unofficial title) was very popular despite being pretty short and simple. If it was made today, I doubt it would get that kind of traction. Back then, new, catchy fan content was really rare and a big deal, and the fact that it was able to spread the way it did is a testament to how formative Flash was as a format in those early days. I believe that Link! He Come To Town! doesn't hold up as well to today's standards as Rawest Forest and Ignorance is Bliss do. You're free to disagree!


If you have Flash content you particularly enjoy, let KoopaTV know! Eligible answers include all of KoopaTV's own games (while not OLD, they are all INSTANT CLASSICS), along with A Koopa's Revenge. Honourable mention (which is perhaps in its own category entirely due to it blowing everything else out of the water in terms of virality) is the All Your Base Are Belong To Us meme.


KoopaTV dedicated its last article of 2020 to Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR.