Cartoon Network Flash Games

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!

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.

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

Someone already did it awhile back.

Gosh, what a nostalgia trip.

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

Someone already did it awhile back.

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.

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.