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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

Haha, nice to see this pop back up. I used to live on this site, making Flash games, chatting on the forums, and as a member of the Clock Crew. Some of my games were fairly popular at the time, including Proximity and some Clock Crew themed games.

I also made (with Rob as the artist) the first commissioned game for what would eventually be the really popular Armor Games site. When he got started he was wanting to do LOTR themed games and was calling his site Games of Gondor, but he didn't stick with it long probably because of legal reasons. It was called Save The Ring!

Here's my user profile, same name as I am on here: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/

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I was a very active troll on the Games of Gondor forums and subsequently a moderator on the Armor Games forums back in my preteens, high school days. I also uploaded a number of crappy games to New Grounds and participated in a bunch of Halloween, Christmas, or just for sake-of-it collabs.

I feel so very fortunate to have had that community and experience; I can't imagine making analogous connections like that on today's internet. Tom Fulp, Dan McNeely, and other friends were my childhood idols!

Could you write a longer-form, in-depth origin story of Armor Games and what became of it?

It's certainly a niche but important part of internet history

NG and AG were wonderful sites that made sure I never did all my homework

    Newgrounds
    Armor Games
    Addicting Games
    Miniclip
    Kongregate
    CoolMathGames

These occupied far too much of my attention when I was younger... was sad to see them decimated with the Flash removal in browsers at the time.

Oh kongregate totally forgot about that

Also Nitrome! Truly a golden age

Nitrome kicked ass! It had such a unified vision for the universe of its games. You could tell they were all conceived with great care and they felt connected to each other. It's nice to see they're looking the same and still alive and kicking [1].

[1] - https://www.nitrome.com

Don’t forget Andkon Arcade (:

What a flood of nostalgia.

I wonder if AI could help in reviving these.

With my zero knowledge of flash is it possible to somehow bridge it into modern browsers using web assembly or something?

Not AI, but Flash games have been 'saved' already, if you've still got the .swf:

https://ruffle.rs/

I was surprised to find Miniclip is still kicking around, hiring developers half an hour away from where I live. Was really tempted to send my CV but sadly they seemed to pivoted to peddling mtx filled slop nowadays.

Joe Cartoon

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