The History of Macromedia Flash, From An Animator’s Standpoint

It was 1993. “Pen computers” were hailed as the next big thing, which was basically the proto-stylus tablets (think Galaxy Tab S or iPad Pro).
Jonathan Gay and Charlie Jackson thought that those had potential, so they founded “FutureWave Software” and programmed a little vector-based tool called SmartSketch, which would let you draw on said “pen computers”.

Vector graphics are based on curves and lines instead of pixels, and therefore are resolution-independent, and also considerably lighter.
It was also the first vector graphics software with anti-aliasing.
(Anti-aliasing is smoothing pictures so they don’t have hard, pixelated edges.)

John and Charlie went with vector graphics, because they thought the ability to edit the lines would help digital artists.
But “pen computers” didn’t really take off, so SmartSketch sat there in the backburner for a few years.

Then, as the years passed, the internet was beginning to gain popularity. It was slow, and most had dial-up connections. (For youngsters, the speed of those was around 2–5kb/s).

Since 1987, there was a lightweight graphics engine for animating bitmaps and simple cutscenes for CD-ROM interactive media called Macromedia Director. Macromedia released a web exporter for that called Shockwave. Web developers initially went with that.

Since SmartSketch was based on vector graphics, which were much lighter than traditional bitmap drawings, John and Charlie decided to add basic animation capability in hopes of creating a competitor to Director.
They released the updated version to the public in 1996 as “FutureSplash Animator” and made a simple playback engine for the web, as well as a format for it (.swf).

.SWF files weren’t videos. They contained a library of vector graphics, and “frames” that would define the placement of graphics at certain positions. FutureSplash Animator took off quickly in the web developer and digital artist scene, since the graphics engine was much lighter and it had actual drawing tools, and the UI was much easier to use, unlike Macromedia Director.

FutureSplash Animator was initially used to create very simple ads and motion comics, due to it not having many features.
Newgrounds was launched, which was initially just Tom Fulp’s edgy homepage with short animations with stuff like Barney doing drugs and getting killed.

Macromedia quickly saw potential and bought FutureWave.
FutureSplash Animator became “Macromedia Flash”.

In 1997, Flash 2.0 came. It was a big upgrade. An asset library (reusable graphics and animations), sound support (with an ADPCM codec that could compress a wav file about 4–8 times), buttons (for replaying animations and clickable banners), and simple bitmap vectorization were added (many couldn’t afford graphic tablets, so they’d draw assets on paper and use this feature to clean them up).

All these additions finally made full web cartoons possible for the first time.

The limitations of early web animation was generally to build a library of reusable graphics and animations to make the animation lighter for download over a dial-up connection, and to optimize your animation for 6, 8, or 12fps so it wouldn’t look too choppy playing back on a Pentium 1. Real-time vector graphics rendering was pretty CPU-intensive.

The first one was John K’s The Goddamn George Liquor Program, which was a rather mindblowing feast for the time. It didn’t use the limitations to it’s advantage, and looked rather jerky, due to web animation being very new.
Macromedia were so amazed with it that they invited John K to suggest new features to put in future versions of Flash.

Flash 3 came in 1998, and introduced slightly better interactivity, timeline-independent animations called “movie clips”, and preloader code.

Tom Fulp immediately began making games about killing celebrities for his “Newgrounds” homepage, which blew up due to having pretty impressive gameplay for the time. One of them was the Pico franchise, which most youngsters know from Friday Night Funkin’.

In 1999, Macromedia released Flash 4.
Flash 4 introduced a full programming language called ActionScript with variables and conditions, making full Flash games possible and easy, and an MP3 codec that provided better sound for a smaller filesize. The UI was also made much simpler and simple geometric shape drawing tools were introduced.

That year, Mondo Media decided to launch it’s own web animation division called “Mondo Mini Shows”. They were the first to deliver fully inbetweened web animations that took the constraints to their advantage, including their infamous “Happy Tree Friends” (it contains pretty realistic gore, so beware if you’re checking for the first time!).

Later on, the creators of Happy Tree Friends were invited to Macromedia as well to give suggestions for future Flash versions.

Macromedia tended to listen to their userbase and accept feedback for future Flash versions.

What also helped develop Flash is that many creative people and artists were on the developer team, the most famous one being Joe Sparks, who made Radiskull & Devil Doll back in 1998, with some funding from Macromedia and hosting on their website (on that later!).

People also liked Flash because it was relatively cheap — 300$ for full version, with upgrades 50% off, and 100$ for a cut-down version with less features.

Many web animation and game studios began blowing up besides Spumco and Mondo, such as WildBrain (example: Groovee Monkee), Icebox (examples: Queer Duck, Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln)

That year also saw a debut of the first Flash cartoon for TV called Kevin Spencer, which was an adaptation of a slideshow Flash webseries of the same name from 1998, with intentionally crude animation.

Web animation really began to boom, and companies launched “proto-streaming-services” dedicated to Flash cartoons, including Macromedia themselves. After the dotcom bubble burst, most of them went away, except Mondo.

Meanwhile, Tom Fulp was getting lots of user submissions, and he’d put the cartoons he liked up. Tom kinda got tired of the manual system, so he launched the Newgrounds Portal in 2000 and introduced a voting system to help users judge the content.

In 2000, Macromedia released Flash 5, which expanded on ActionScript even further. ActionScript became as advanced as JavaScript at the time was, allowing for even richer Flash games to be developed. Flash 5’s ActionScript also made dynamic camera movement (referred by the Flash community as the ‘V-Cam’ possible), though it didn’t gain traction until Flash MX 2004.

Flash games were mainly dynamic animations controlled by mouse/key input, so Flash was kinda used as a simple game engine, much like Game Maker and Clickteam Fusion are used today.

In 2002, Flash MX came, with a much simpler UI and improved drawing tools. Support for streaming video was added, which eventually made YouTube possible.

2003’s Flash MX 2004 introduced ‘ActionScript 2’, which introduced Java-style low-level manipulation to AS. The drag-and-drop scripting menu was removed.
Higher quality Flash-based TV shows began popping up, such as Kikoriki and Fosters’ Home For Imaginary Friends.

As the years passed, internet and computer speeds got faster, so web animators could make their animations at a standard 24fps with some traditional frame-by-frame sprinkled in. It was rather unstable though.

In 2005, Flash 8 came, which introduced special effects like blurring and glowing, and improved stability.

Flash’s popularity inspired ToonBoom to port their private software from their proprietary UNIX flavor to Windows and Mac and release it to the public to create competition.
ToonBoom launched in the early 90s as USAnimation, with their private digital ink-and-paint and compositing software on their proprietary UNIX workstations.
Animation studios were expected to send rough animation to their office, and have the cleaned up tape sent back to them. USAnimation’s software was used to clean-up and composite many 90s TV cartoons, such as Rocko, Ren and Stimpy, and Hey Arnold!

Shortly after, Adobe bought Macromedia.
They pretty much left the codebase rotting, with each new version only adding bugs, crashes, lags and glitches.
As technology evolved, streaming video came along, and pure-Flash animations were no longer needed, though you could still use Flash to make video animations.

Flash still exists as a very buggy mess called ‘Adobe Animate’, but it’s pissed so many people in the animation industry off that they switched to ToonBoom Harmony, which was released to the public around the same time Adobe bought Macromedia. (just read Zeurel’s tweets mentioning Animate to see how buggy it’s become! Or watch Studio Exit 73’s Flash MX vs Animate comparisons on YouTube.)

However, plenty of modern productions still use Animate, such as Peppa Pig, Gumball (for 2D character animations), Teen Titans Go!, Among Us, and Friday Night Funkin’.

What also didn’t help Flash was that ToonBoom introduced complex rigging, which allowed for pretty cool limb and torso bending. (example: Rick and Morty.)

Another mistake Adobe did was to change ActionScript so heavily it became unrecognizable and break backwards compatibility, which is partially why HTML5 replaced it, as you were expected to write graphics rendering all by yourself, which wasn’t much different from HTML5.

You can still have fun with Flash today. Just grab yourself Flash 8 with a key from Google, or MX (if you’re in a place with strict piracy regulations, like a dorm!), and use Swivel to render your animations to streaming video and Ruffle to export HTML5 games made with ActionScript!