The Strong museum, home to the World Video Game Hall of Fame, is partnering with Kongregate, the massive Flash game portal, to preserve more than 10,000 of the Flash browser games that entertained and defined the early internet generation.
The museum will preserve Kongregate’s digital materials, including the metadata, making it available for research and educational purposes as well as exhibits.
Browser support for the Adobe Flash Player multimedia software platform’s browser plugin will end with this year, putting many of these games at risk of being lost or unplayable in the future. The collaboration allows the museum to download and preserve the tens of thousands of Flash games uploaded to Kongregate.
“Flash games are an important piece of gaming history,” said Andrew Borman, digital games curator at The Strong. “They provided access to countless games for free to anyone with an Internet connection.
Flash games were relatively easy to create, and therefore they opened the game development process to thousands of people, some of whom went on to produce commercial games. Flash games also introduced themes and play mechanics that became popular in many video games, especially with the rise in the popularity of mobile games.”
The New York museum will make the games accessible on site to researchers by appointment, and it will implement best practices to ensure that these games can still be played as they were originally developed.
“By partnering with The Strong, we can ensure that Kongregate’s collection of Flash games will help future generations understand the impact that these games have had on society,” said Janet Ebsen, Kongregate’s director of platform and player relations. “For the developers of these games, this is a unique opportunity for their art to be recognized and preserved by a leading museum in the video game field. That’s really cool.”
