The best old Flash games and where to play them now

By Obscure Internet 26 Oct 2026 12 min read

The best old Flash games are the ones a whole generation played on school and office computers: Alien Hominid, Motherload, Line Rider, Bloons Tower Defense, Papa’s Pizzeria, QWOP, Canabalt and a handful more. You can still play most of them legitimately today, because their makers kept them going on their own websites, on Newgrounds, or as official re-releases on Steam and phones.

This page is a list, not an obituary. If you want the story of how Flash itself died, that’s in What happened to Flash games? Here we’ve picked thirteen games, in twelve entries, that pass the “oh, I remember that” test, and for each one we’ve found where its creator, or the company that owns it now, lets you play it. We’ve left out anything whose only home is somebody else’s upload.

EXHIBIT

Can you still play old Flash games?

Yes. Flash Player itself is gone: Adobe stopped supporting it at the end of 2020 and blocked Flash content from 12 January 2021, which is why the grey “Adobe Flash Player is blocked” box was the last thing many of us saw of our favourites. But the games were only ever files, and files can be rescued.

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There are three legitimate routes back. Some makers rebuilt their games in HTML5, so they run in an ordinary browser with nothing to install. Some sites, Newgrounds among them, play the original Flash files through Ruffle, a free emulator. And several studios have put their old games out again as official collections and remasters. Each entry below says which route works, in the order the games came out.

Alien Hominid (2002)

Tom Fulp, who runs Newgrounds, wrote the code. Dan Paladin drew it. It went up on Newgrounds on 7 August 2002, and its pitch was one line long: “Your UFO has crash landed, and the FBI is out to get you!”

What followed was a fast, hard run-and-gun with a small yellow alien, a lot of men in suits and Paladin’s scratchy cartoon art. It looked and played like a console game, and that was the point. By April 2004 its page had counted more than five million views, and Fulp and Paladin were making a full console version, so the page had to warn people, in capitals, that this wasn’t it.

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Where to play it now: on Newgrounds, where it’s been since 2002 and has passed 21 million views. It runs through Ruffle, and the makers are honest about the rough edges: “It’s not 100% perfect yet so you’ll notice the music stops and you can’t see your lives at the moment.” The author’s note also points to the console version and to Alien Hominid Invasion, a newer game in the series.

Motherload (2004)

XGen Studios released Motherload on 29 September 2004. You flew a little mining pod into the ground on Mars, dug for minerals, flew back up to sell them, and spent the money on a bigger drill, a bigger fuel tank and a hull that could survive the gas pockets and earthquakes further down. It was the game for anyone who’d ever enjoyed Dig Dug, and its own page said so.

It was also a big download for the time, at 3,767 KB, and the instructions opened with a plea: “PLEASE BE PATIENT WHILE MOTHERLOAD LOADS. (This may take several minutes if you are using a dial-up connection).” Plenty of people found it on Miniclip, digging through ICT lessons with the sound off.

Where to play it now: XGen still had Motherload’s own page, with a Play button, on its site in September 2026, alongside links to the sequel, Super Motherload, and Motherload Goldium. If the game won’t start in your browser, the Ruffle extension (see below) is the safe way to run the official copy.

The Fancy Pants Adventures (2006)

Brad Borne’s stick figure in a pair of very fancy trousers first ran across the web in 2006. The Fancy Pants Adventures was a platformer that felt like a cartoon: everything had a scribbly, hand-drawn look, and Fancy Pants Man built up speed down slopes, skidded round corners and bounced off walls with a lovely sense of weight.

Where to play it now: The Fancy Pants Adventures: Classic Pack on Steam, where Borne is rebuilding the original games himself. It went into Early Access on 18 February 2024 with “Classic” versions of Worlds 1, 2 and 3. One honest note: in October 2026 its store page warned that the developer’s last update was more than two years old.

Line Rider (2006)

Boštjan Čadež, a Slovenian student, put Line Rider online in September 2006. You drew a line, pressed play, and a small man on a sled rode down it. Within weeks people everywhere were building ramps, loops and impossible jumps, and filming the results for a brand-new YouTube. There’s more on that in our Line Rider card.

Where to play it now: linerider.com, its official site, which runs in an ordinary browser. The page still carries Čadež’s name: “Line Rider” is his registered trademark.

Bloons and Bloons Tower Defense (2007)

Ninja Kiwi, a studio from New Zealand, gave the world a monkey with a handful of darts and a screen full of balloons in 2007. Bloons was a puzzle game about the perfect throw. Bloons Tower Defense, the same year, turned the balloons into an endless parade and the monkeys into towers, and it grew into one of the biggest tower defence series there is.

Where to play it now: the Ninja Kiwi Archive, which Ninja Kiwi released free on Steam on 8 July 2020 so its Flash games would survive the end of Flash. It holds more than 60 of them, from the first Bloons through Bloons TD 5, and Ninja Kiwi’s site also offers versions that don’t need Steam, for Windows and Mac. Log in with an old Ninja Kiwi account and you can even get your saves back.

Papa’s Pizzeria (2007)

Flipline Studios’ Papa’s Pizzeria left Delivery Boy Roy in charge while Papa Louie went off on an adventure. You took orders, topped, baked and sliced, and the customers were fussy. As Flipline’s own description put it: “Whether it is 8 pepperonis everywhere and 2 olives on the lower half, or a 10 onion pizza cooked well done and cut in 4 slices, there is no telling what they will come up with.”

It spawned a whole chain of Papa’s restaurants, which Flipline calls Gamerias, and the last of the web games, Papa’s Scooperia, came out in mid-2018.

Where to play it now: Flipline said it would keep the Flash versions “accessible on our website for legacy browsers and any possible future solutions that may develop”, and Papa’s Pizzeria still has its page there. The easier route is Papa’s Pizzeria Deluxe, which Flipline released on Steam on 19 November 2024 for Windows, or Papa’s Pizzeria To Go! on phones and Papa’s Pizzeria HD on tablets.

Dino Run (2008)

Pixeljam’s Dino Run, made with XGen Studios, put you in charge of a small pixel-art raptor running for its life from extinction, with an ever-closing Wall of Doom behind it. You leapt over rocks, scooped up eggs and never, ever stopped.

Where to play it now: Dino Run DX on Steam, Pixeljam’s expanded version, out since 29 September 2015. Its store page pitches it at “veteran[s] of the original web game”.

Meat Boy (2008)

Edmund McMillen drew it, Jonathan McEntee programmed it, and Danny Baranowsky wrote the music. Meat Boy went up on Newgrounds on 5 October 2008: a small, skinless cube of meat leaping between walls, dodging saw blades and dying over and over to rescue his girlfriend, Bandage Girl. It was cruel and fair at the same time, which is a very hard trick.

Two years later it became Super Meat Boy, one of the indie hits of 2010. The Newgrounds page is very keen that you know the difference: “This is NOT Super Meat Boy! Its simply the flash prototype that Super Meat Boy was based off of.”

Where to play it now: on Newgrounds, uploaded by its creators and signed “Team Meat”, with more than 4.5 million views.

QWOP (2008)

Bennett Foddy made QWOP in 2008 and put it on his own website. You played a sprinter in a 100 metres race, using four keys: Q and W for his thighs, O and P for his calves. Almost nobody got more than a few metres before folding up like a deckchair. Getting all the way to the end was a party trick; watching a friend try was half the fun.

Where to play it now: Foddy.net, which now has an HTML5 version, so it runs without Flash. “This page now supports mobile browsers - kind of!” he writes.

Crush the Castle (2009)

Armor Games made Crush the Castle in 2009. You had a trebuchet, a pile of boulders and a castle full of tiny royals, and the aim was to bring the whole thing down on their heads in as few shots as possible. The physics made every throw different, and watching a tower wobble before it fell was the best bit. By 2022, Armor Games said the original had been played around 26.9 million times on its website alone.

Where to play it now: the Crush the Castle Legacy Collection from Armor Games Studios, on Steam since 29 March 2022. It remasters the original, Crush the Castle 2 and Crush the Castle Adventures, plus the Players Packs, and Armor Games also announced it for iOS and Android.

Canabalt (2009)

Adam Saltsman made Canabalt for the Experimental Gameplay Project, whose theme was “Bare Minimum”, so it had one button. A man in a suit ran across the rooftops of a collapsing city, you pressed a key to jump, and that was it. Danny Baranowsky’s music did the rest. Saltsman built the Flash version in just five days, and its site now calls it “the game that popularized the infinite runner genre”.

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Where to play it now: canabalt.com. In 2024 Saltsman’s studio, Finji, and the developer Cameron Taylor ported it to HTML5 so it could, in Finji’s words, “once again, be freely available as an open source browser game”. It’s on Steam too.

Fireboy and Watergirl (2009)

Oslo Albet’s Fireboy and Watergirl in the Forest Temple was the game two friends played on one keyboard, one on the arrow keys and one on the letter keys. Fireboy could walk through lava but not water, Watergirl the other way round, and every level needed both of them to reach the exit. It was a fixture of Coolmath Games, which carried the later temples too.

Where to play it now: Fireboy & Watergirl 1: The Forest Temple on Steam, released by Oslo Albet on 1 September 2026, for one player or two. Don’t count on the browser: in October 2026 Coolmath’s page for the original said, “This Flash game is currently not playable in your browser, but we’re working on a fix!”

What about Desktop Tower Defense, The Impossible Quiz and Riddle School?

Three more that everyone remembers are still where their makers put them. Paul Preece’s Desktop Tower Defense is on Kongregate under his account, preecep. Splapp-me-do’s The Impossible Quiz is on Newgrounds, still insisting “It’s not actually impossible though, just really really hard.” And JonBro’s Riddle School is on Newgrounds too.

Copies of all of them are scattered across the web, uploaded by people who didn’t make them, and we don’t send readers to those. If a game you loved has no official home at all, a preservation project such as Flashpoint, below, is the place to look.

How do you play old Flash games now?

Start with the maker’s own site or the official re-release, as above. After that, two free projects do most of the work.

Ruffle is an open source Flash Player emulator. It’s written in Rust and runs as WebAssembly, so it avoids the security problems Flash was famous for, and it comes as a browser extension that wakes up old Flash files on any site. It’s what Newgrounds uses to keep Alien Hominid and Meat Boy running.

Flashpoint Archive is a volunteer preservation project that began in December 2017 and has saved more than 200,000 web games and animations, made with Flash, Shockwave and over a hundred other technologies. You install its launcher on your computer and play from there.

One firm warning. Don’t download anything that calls itself Flash Player. Adobe stopped offering it to the public years ago, and its own end-of-life page warns against unauthorised copies on other websites: “Unauthorized downloads are a common source of malware and viruses.”

How do you download old Flash games?

The safest downloads are the official ones: the Ninja Kiwi Archive, and the Steam releases of Papa’s Pizzeria Deluxe, The Fancy Pants Adventures: Classic Pack, the Crush the Castle Legacy Collection and Dino Run DX. Each comes straight from the people who made the game. For everything else, Flashpoint is a download in itself, with its launcher and archive on your own machine, so the games keep working even when the sites that hosted them have gone.

What happened to Flash games?

The phones won. Flash never made it onto the iPhone, the audience moved to apps, and the browsers spent years switching the plug-in off before Adobe ended it. Flash Player support stopped on 31 December 2020, and the full story of what came after is in What happened to Flash games?

The best old Flash games: a timeline

• 7 August 2002: Alien Hominid goes up on Newgrounds.
• 29 September 2004: XGen Studios releases Motherload.
• 2006: The Fancy Pants Adventures arrives, and in September, Line Rider.
• 2007: Bloons, Bloons Tower Defense and Papa’s Pizzeria.
• 2008: Dino Run; Meat Boy on 5 October; QWOP.
• 2009: Crush the Castle, Canabalt and Fireboy and Watergirl in the Forest Temple.
• 8 July 2020: The Ninja Kiwi Archive comes out free on Steam.
• 31 December 2020: Adobe ends support for Flash Player.
• 12 January 2021: Adobe blocks Flash content from running in Flash Player.
• 29 March 2022: The Crush the Castle Legacy Collection launches on Steam.
• 18 February 2024: The Fancy Pants Adventures: Classic Pack enters Early Access.
• April 2024: Finji announces Canabalt is free to play in the browser again.
• 19 November 2024: Papa’s Pizzeria Deluxe arrives on Steam.
• 1 September 2026: Fireboy & Watergirl 1: The Forest Temple arrives on Steam.

There’s plenty more from the same years in The Playground Years, and if you’d rather hang out than play, check in to Habbo Hotel.

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