Do you remember… "Adobe Flash Player is blocked"?

For years, the internet had a small grey jigsaw piece where a game should have been. You’d find a site you loved, the page would load, and in place of the fun there was just a grey box and a message: Adobe Flash Player is blocked.

At first it was a nuisance. Click, allow, play. Then browsers made it harder each year, asking you every single time and hiding the setting further down the menus. It felt like the web was gently trying to get you to leave.

It was. Flash had powered the games, cartoons and music players of a whole era, but it was slow on phones and a constant security headache. Adobe stopped supporting it on 31 December 2020, and from 12 January 2021 Flash Player refused to run content at all.

The grey puzzle piece was the last thing many of us saw of a thousand favourite games. The good news is that a lot of them were saved, and many are playable again.