Never forget that we grew up on Flash.

Sometime around the turn of the century, I got my very first Internet-enabled computer. I remember why we got it, too—my dad had seen a news story about Napster, and wanted to stop paying Columbia House for music. So we got America Online and he started downloading the complete works of The Police and Eagles.

It wasn’t my first foray into the Internet, nor was it my first foray into computers. In one of the sentences that will no doubt date me and confuse anyone even a year younger than me, I was introduced to the Internet through WebTV, an Internet appliance that used our Trinitron TV as a display and a wireless keyboard as a navigation tool.

It was on a WebTV that my ambition as a child started manifesting itself as I started learning HTML to make my own website. I somehow found Angelfire as a web host and started reading tutorials on how to make websites. As I didn’t know what copying and pasting on computers was, I filled notebooks with HTML code for things like SiteCounters and guestbooks and little tricks. I learned how to join webrings and learned how the WebTV parsed its special HTML so I had fancy sidebars and great-sounding MIDI files that no doubt didn’t translate well on a computer at all.

But when I got the Internet, an entire world of multimedia experiences opened up to me. I remember remixing Smash Mouth’s All Star and Thomas Dolby’s She Blinded Me With Science on Shockwave.com. I remember playing Slingo on AOL and throwing “gg” and “dd” into the chat to celebrate and commiserate. But the two sites that were the most influential in how I got to where I am today were Newgrounds and FlashGames².

FlashGames² was a compendium of game show simulations created mainly by programmers Christopher Colbourne and Dan Berger. The games were faithful simulations of game show bonus rounds, like The Joker’s Wild’s Beat the Devil bonus round, or Classic Concentration’s car matching bonus round.

I was inspred by FlashGames² to create my own works, because now I knew 1) they were made by regular people, just like me and 2) I knew they were made in something called Flash. I downloaded a demo of Flash and started to teach myself how to draw things and how scenes worked.

The first game I ever made was a game called Drop the Bomb. It took the bonus round of The Joker’s Wild (where a player spins a slot machine and racks of money, and must earn $1,000 before a Devil is spun in a window) and changed some stuff. The goal was $5,000 and instead of Devils, there were Bombs. If you spun a Bomb, the window would explode and your score would reset. You could continue to play but you would have to get to $5,000 with only two windows (or even one window, if you hit two bombs).

Which brings me to Newgrounds.

At this point in my Internet journey, my web hosting needs were being fulfilled by a British company called Moonfruit, which specialized in high-media websites purely built in Macromedia Flash. More importantly, it was free, which was important for me, as a 15-year-old with no source of income except for allowance from my parents but certainly no debit or credit card with which I could exchange my legal tender through the Internet. So I had a website but what I needed was an audience and a low barrier of entry. And that’s where Newgrounds came in.

I had spent hours playing, rating, watching on Newgrounds. I was exposed to Pico, stick figure fighters, lots of weird indie animation, and probably my fair share of boobs and violence. But this giant community felt so small, so tight-knit. The forums contained helpful tips on Flash development. Reviews for my games were some of the harshest critiques I’ve ever had, but they widened my viewpoint on what the masses considered fun. I learned to grow a thick skin when someone said my games sucked.

I shared my first flash game, Drop the Bomb, in 2001, and from there, I’ve shared over 20 interactive works to Newgrounds. One of them, a simulation of Deal or No Deal, made it to the Front Page, one of the biggest honors I’ve ever received professionally. (It was nuked by NBC but not before being copied to almost every two-bit game website on the planet.) That attention led to my first professional commission, a food-based parody entitled Meal or No Meal and the ability to put MTV on my resume in my freshman year of college.

This week, Adobe announced plans to stop development and distribution of the Flash browser plugin by 2020. They’ve released no details on what will happen to the plugin after that point, but chances are browsers will stop supporting it and any Flash media on the web will be unable to play in browser. Many people celebrated the news, the final death knell of Flash. But more than a reboot of Jumanji, more than Legends of the Hidden Temple turning into a movie, more than no one knowing what a Tamagotchi is anymore, more than losing my Dashboard Confessional CDs—nothing genuinely and truly will kill the tangible memories of the most formative years of my life than killing Flash.

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