EDIT: The HTML5 version is dead! However, the Newgrounds player seems to be working for it these days!
I’ve been getting this question on the Discord every day, so let’s clear this up as well as we can.
The short version is:
- You can still download the SWF file in the tabs to the left from the MVOL Download page, and right under that link is a link to a standalone Flash Projector program from Adobe that still works 100% in my experience.
- Right under that link is a download for the Android version, which should continue working for some time.
- On Newgrounds, you can download their special player and play the game here. Note it takes about 60-120 seconds to actually load when you open it.
- You can probably play most other Flash games using that projector I keep linked there. However, be careful where you download from! They shut Flash down because it lets people do sleazy things to your computer and they gave up finding ways to stop that happening.
- Various groups are working on replacements for Flash that will let us continue playing these games in the long term. A lot of people out there are passionate about these games and want them to be around forever, so if you’re worried too, go find them and support them or help out however you can.
That should answer your burning questions. If you’d like some more info on what’s going on with all this, as well as I know about it at least, then read on.
For a long time, Flash was awesome because it was one simple, easy to share file that could run on almost anything to make animations or games work. This led to the gaming renaissance of Newgrounds and various similar outpourings of creativity, and it was awesome. The people behind Flash worked hard to make it both compatible with many different systems and browsers as well as packed with many different capabilities for stuff like multiplayer, save files, and all those things we take for granted with most games.
The problem is, multiplayer means “let this file exchange information with a remote server,” and save files means “let this file mess around with the data on your computer,” and those two factors together (surprisingly complex tasks to even get working in the first place) mean that it’s stupid easy for any random asshole to make a “game” that does however many awful things with your computer. Feed your important data to their server, give you viruses, whatever.
So there are ways to prevent that, though, right? Sure. But there are a lot of assholes out there that know anything at all about computers, and they spend their spare time finding new ways to sneak stuff through. This is the same reason they keep running security updates on Windows all the dang time. It’s not like your computer gets less secure on its own over time, or they didn’t make it as secure as they could to start with. Every week, nerds with bad intentions find new ways to make our lives worse, and these companies pay their nerds to find ways to stop that.
Eventually, it got harder and harder to make Flash not a gaping orifice in your computer’s defenses, and various companies, like Mozilla, started trying to get people to move away from Flash. But we love Flash! So we said “damn the risk, run the file!” and… sooner or later, that can come back to bite us pretty hard. And keeping Flash working, and securely working, was costing Adobe more and more money for this one weird application from twenty-five years ago. Yeah, this format came out in 1996. So, honestly kinda impressive it held out this long. But Adobe had had enough, and they announced they were cutting support.
Now, that didn’t mean your Flash Player would explode in January or whatever. It just meant they wouldn’t be updating it anymore, so any exploits the evil nerds find after that are just… there, forever. So they add it to their pile of evil nerd weapons and keep finding more exploits to screw up your computer (or your finances or whatever) even harder the longer they’re at it without any company-paid nerds stopping them. This is pretty much the same as what happened with Windows 7. You can still run it, but it’s riskier with every passing day.
So how do you not get screwed by evil nerds? Well, the easiest way is to not run Flash games. But any games you downloaded before the death date are probably going to be safe pretty much forever. From here, be careful about where you download new Flash files from if you’re going to run them on that projector, because if you get it from a sketchy site (or even a well-meaning site that doesn’t go through and filter their stuff aggressively) then you might be literally downloading a virus, or worse.
So as long as you’re careful about what you run you’ll mostly be fine, right? Well, it gets a little more complicated. Adobe saw that everybody just wanted to keep running Flash, and they don’t want to get sued by all the people that will inevitably get screwed by evil nerds because of their “dead” program. So they’ve started trying to just get Flash completely off your system any way they can. To be honest, I don’t even know all the details of what all Flash needs in order to run, I think you may need to have some certain things installed even to get that projector to run, but I’d be happy to hear how that’s worked for other people. I still get popups occasionally from Adobe asking me to pretty please uninstall and I just close them. So that’s annoying. I even heard that Win10 is trying to “automatically uninstall” it “for your safety,” but so far I haven’t heard any verifiable reports that the projector has stopped working for people, so fingers crossed, we’re okay there.
But even if we’re not, this isn’t really the end. There’s still the Android version of MVOL and the HTML5 version. I might be able to find new ways to package the game as a standalone in its own right, and I still have all the source material, I’ve been hoping to get a proper standalone version built entirely in a new engine working at some point. I certainly don’t intend to see MVOL just up and die. I’ve put too many years of my life and too much of my soul into this game to let it just become a memory from another era. So don’t you worry about MVOL.
And besides that, there are other teams out there that are willing to pick up where Adobe left off and try to make a new Flash Player of sorts. It probably won’t be able to do ALL the same things the original did, but I assume that could also make it a lot more secure to run and easier to keep running securely in the long run. I know folks from Newgrounds are working on one, but it sounds like there might be several different efforts going on out there. I don’t know that any are really up at 100% yet, nor that any of them can run MVOL yet, but it does give us hope for continuing to discover and enjoy new games wherever we find them in the future.
If you’d like to know more about those, I did find a pretty interesting video that delves even more into a lot of this stuff and discusses several projects for keeping Flash games alive forever in much more detail, so I’d encourage you to check it out over here if you’re passionate about Flash games in general too. As I mentioned in the bullets, these folks can probably always use more help, be it pitching in on coding or testing, spreading the word about what they’re doing, or just buying them coffee. If you’re worried about this, then consider doing your part to keep lightweight, easily shared games and animations a part of our internet.
That covers just about everything I know on the subject. I’m not an expert by the way, I can’t guarantee any of this is 100% accurate, I’m just a writer that has barely gotten by making the words move around how I want in Flash, so consider doing your own research as well! But hopefully if you were despairing over recent developments, this all has given you a little fresh hope for one of the great traditions of entertainment on the internet.
It’s been an honor to contribute to that body of work in my own little way. Thanks for reading.