I know everyone out there knows about the "death" of Adobe Flash and talks about how it hasn't been supported since 1/12/2021, but I haven't heard much online about it's cousin Adobe Shockwave for some reason despite support for Adobe Shockwave ending on 4/9/2019, almost 2 years before Flash, and yet there aren't any YouTube videos or discussion threads online talking about the "death" of Shockwave for some weird reason.

I've decided to create this blog for the very purpose of sharing some information about Adobe Shockwave (formerly Macromedia Shockwave) as well as some examples of some web games made using Shockwave. I would've made this into a thread about this in the Reclaiming The Internet forum, but I feel like this is a topic which should be shareable to and discussed with more individuals here on this website.

As a kid, I grew up playing both Adobe Flash and Adobe Shockwave games (as well as some Unity 3D ones).

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Adobe Shockwave, formerly known as Shockwave Director and Macromedia Shockwave, was a web broser plugin which ran DCR files, which were a key component of Shockwave, as well as the Director editing software used to develop Shockwave games. Shockwave was introduced by Macromedia in 1995 and there are many web games from the mid 90s until maybe around the mid 2000s or so which were developed using Shockwave.

It's functionality was pretty similar to that of Adobe Flash (formerly known as FutureSplash, Shockwave Flash, and Macromedia Flash), except at the time it was introduced, Shockwave's capabilities exceeded those of earlier versions Flash (the latter of which was introduced a year later in 1996, and was used primarily for simple web animations until it eventually became more capable of adding interactive features, particularly so after the release of Flash Player 5 in 2000). And unlike Shockwave Director, Flash ran SWF files.

In 2001, over 200 million people had Shockwave installed onto their computers, making Shockwave a widely used format for online games. 2001 was also the year Shockwave version 8.5 was released, which introduced 3D capabilities and integrated Flash 5. Because of this, Shockwave initially had the upper hand over Flash in terms of its dominance and in terms of its functionality.

However, as Flash evolved and gained new capabilities, it quickly became the most popular and most well known web game software by the year 2005.

Also in 2005, Adobe purchased Macromedia and accquired both Shockwave and Flash (which is ironic given how Adobe initially rejected FutureWave's offer to sell it's precursor, SmartSketch, to them in 1995).

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Obviously, despite losing its former dominance in the web game industry, Shockwave was still coming out with new releases until its final version, version 12.3.5.205, was released in March 2019, less than a month before Adobe decided to finally pull the plug on Shockwave.

Prior to Shockwave itself being put on the chopping block, Adobe had already ended it's support for Adobe Director (the authoring tool for Shockwave games) on 2/1/2017. This of course spelled doom for the fate of Adobe Shockwave as this meant that new Shockwave games could no longer be created. This is what really killed Shockwave even though its popularity had been waning since around 2011 when a statistic showed that although 99% of computers had Flash installed, only 43% still had Shockwave installed.

Most web browsers quickly jumped on board with Adobe's decision to pwn Shockwave and stopped offering support for the plugin (which of course they've also done with other plugins such as Flash and Unity 3D). 

Despite most modern web browsers no longer supporting Shockwave, Pale Moon still allows users to run Shockwave (as well as other discontinued plugins such as Unity 3D, Java, and Flash), not to mention BlueMaxima's Flashpoint which can run all sorts of web games, including Shockwave games.

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So yeah, this concludes my blog post about the history of Shockwave and I'm hoping this blog will draw in a community of people who also remember playing Shockwave games in the past (as well as the ones who still do) and I'm hoping this blog post will raise the awareness of Adobe Shockwave, its discontinuation, and it's legacy on the web browser game industry.