I remember on the 2000s, when I was a teenager and my father decided to bring a 250kbps Internet connection to our home.

Then I discovered a thing that changed my life, Flash cartoons & games by small creators, of any quality about whatever the author wants to tell.

I didn't have cable-tv back then so I used to ask my friends with cable to record me some episodes of my favorites cartoons with a VHS, but with this discovery I almost forgot about any media, I totally fell in love with Flash Cartoons !

I enjoyed a lot watching every flash animation that I encounter on the web, also playing really incredible games, the first authors that I checked out were Gerkiman, Legendary Frog, Super Flash Bros, Joanime & Cycon.

It was a matter of time when I decided to make a DeviantArt account, then Newgrounds account and last but not least SheezyArt account to begin sharing my own creations.

When I've got a copy of Macromedia Flash 8 my mind exploded, I felt that I had the best thing on computer history in my hands, and of course I still believe that.

Nowadays I'm still using my old Macromedia Flash copy to make drawings, designs and animations, I grow strong with it and helps to keep my style

Learning and making cartoons & games was a really great joyride in Flash 8, adding frames, fill the library of MovieClips , sounds and graphics, coding some stuff in ActionScript 2.0 for a game or to add some cool Easter Eggs for your movie.

And when I finished the SWF, the final challenge was to appear on the Top 5 of Newgrounds to earn a virtual trophy, I remember being late at the night looking every review, lots of them where pretty hard on me, but somehow were a lot more elaborate that the "comments" that people have today

And thanks to Flash and NG I meet Sonucais, my best comrade, he is a genius creating content ! the funny thing it's that we meet on a valentine's day 02/14/2009, because we both submitted a flash based on valentine's day

Well for me Flash make the internet a really enjoyable place but then two events occurred that were trying to take apart our precious tool:

• Adobe bought Macromedia, and did a poorly job on the updates of Flash
• Mr. Apple decided to plan a scheme to kill Flash instead of welcoming a player on his shitty iPhone.

The excuse of Mr. Apple was a joke, and of course HTML5 it's a great technology, but HTML5 it's not Flash,

As a Game Dev I confirm that publishing on HTML5 it's a great risk for the gameplay experience, you have to try the game on a ton of browsers & devices to check if there is an issue on one of them, with flash that doesn't happened.

and the weight of the files increases a lot with HTML5 compared to a simple Swf.

But Mr.Apple it's powerful and a lot of consumers listen to him like some kind of Jesus, and well you know the end of the story

Please, don't buy any stuff from this people.

And here we are today at 2021, a year where you have to do some tweaks to enjoy Flash content with an internet filled of pure video.

I'm proud of Newgrounds for keep being a reminder of more that 10 years of flash creations, and Ruffle an impressive opensource flash emulator for browsers, keep with the good work boys !

Flash Makers were great, Flash Makers are great, Flash Makers will be great, long live to all the swf's created !

Markanime

January, 2021