Early in the New Year, Adobe finally put the final nail in Flash's coffin. But if you have an old Game Boy, you may be able to carry a small piece of Flash history around in your pocket.

With the last update to Flash Player completely removing the ability to run Flash projects, developer Anthony Lovell suddenly found that his catalog of over 70 web games was almost unplayable. Lovell's demo reel will elicit nostalgic sighs from people my age.

I certainly don't know a student in my high school who doesn't play "Shift."

While many of these may become playable through projects like Flashpoint and the Internet Archive's Flash library, Lavelle took it upon himself to preserve his personal favorites. Such is the case.

"IndestructoTank!" is a game about an indestructible tank (get it?) with falling bombs. It's a great game, but it lives on thanks to its port to the Nintendo Game Boy. It looks a little sluggish and the palette isn't as vibrant as the old browser games, but the play is just as good as I remember it.

Furthermore, despite Adobe Flash Player's refusal to run its own proprietary software, the game should work fine on even the rattiest old handhelds, according to Ravel's fair play. proprietary software because it refuses to run it. Ravel does.

If you have an old handheld console, the developers are providing ROMs and source code so that you can play it on real hardware. Otherwise, you can play it as a free browser game on Itch.io.

This is at least a welcome return to the old Flash ecosystem. But as Lovell laments in his ongoing Reddit AMA, there is little sign that anything new is taking up the mantle when it comes to widely accessible game development.

"There is no platform today that allows for quick and ridiculous development with an easy learning curve that rivals Flash. You didn't have to be a programmer or artist to get started. I could draw a stick figure on the screen and have it running around in less than five minutes. More importantly, if you came up with an idea in a flash, you could draw it and have it running in a file that could be opened by anyone in the world in five minutes."[17