Browser Games: A Decade in Review

Every month I do a retrospective of some of the best flash games of the past four weeks, which requires me to play dozens of new games just to pick out the top three. It's strange to think that such a high volume of new browser games are produced every month now. Just a few short years ago there were so few browser games in existence that every game in every language still would fill the current catalog of a given game portal. Though the most profitable change in the world of video games this decade has been the shift of console gaming to the mainstream, the most revolutionary has to be the medium's total reinvention in Internet-based titles.

Macromedia Flash, now owned by Adobe, first hit the market in 1996. High speed Internet was effectively non-existent at that time, so the software didn't have its primary platform yet. Still, Flash was a remarkable tool for simple computer animation and interactivity. Together with programs like Shockwave, it made computer visual design accessible to people at home, providing a learning curve that wasn't too steep for amateur animators to give it a go. Now Flash is so standard to the creation of browser games that we call browser games "Flash Games".

In the early years of browser games, the titles themselves were scattered around the Internet. A few sites compiled them, but none were more innovative or prescient of future trends than Tom Fulp's Newgrounds. Today the site is a behemoth in terms of original amateur content and the reason for that is Fulp's "Portal" concept. Long before it was popular, Newgrounds applied a model of user-uploaded content to be rated by other users so the best would naturally rise to the top. This guaranteed platform gave designers a reason to make better games with each passing week. Now every browser game site on the Internet worth its bandwidth works in essentially the same way.

Like console gaming in microcosm, browser games got steadily prettier and more complex as the decade progressed. Simple but addictive games like Rooftop Skater proved that Flash-based games were viable entertainment, not just low-grade Internet toys. When connection speeds increased, so did the overall quality of the games. In the middle of the decade puzzle games replaced old office standbys like Tetris and Minesweeper while nifty challenges to traditional game paradigms like Line Rider took a postmodern approach that had yet to make it to consoles.

Today, as the 00's come to a close, browser games fit into every genre and continue to be a source of innovation. For gaming culture, Internet-based games have become a regular part of the distraction diet, demanding just as much attention to design and entertainment as the studio titles on the shelves. Arguably, mainstream venues like X-Box Live Arcade are attempts to incorporate browser aesthetics to console gaming, a far cry from early days of MS Paint adventure games.

As we enter a new decade it seems that browser games will continue to explode. With fewer studio games relying on hard copy editions for sales, it seems that the market is equalizing with the inclusion of smaller, more clever games into the same stream as multimillion-dollar franchises. No one knows what browser games will look like a decade from now, but given the progress of the past ten years the prospect of continued evolution is exciting.