My favorite three aren't in there. All Dexter's Lab themed, now that I think about it.
One was puzzle game where you had to bounce a laser off of mirrors to pop balloons. The second was kind of a Chip's Challenge kind of deal I think, where you as Dexter were running away from an out of control robot, and had to collect some computer chips or something.
And in the third game, Dexter was running, inexplicably, a record store? Dunno if it was a tie in for a specific episode I don't remember now, but it's quite a funny premise, and a fun game too.
If you worked on any of these games, thank you! I spent so many hours back then on those, and many others.
I still had dial up back then, and I couldn't stay online for long. Eventually I figured out that if I kept the website open, then disconnected (rather than closing then disconnecting, which was what my parents taught me), the games would still work. Which is obvious to me now, of course, but as a 6~7 year old, who had no idea of how any of this worked, I felt like an actual, proper hacker. I literally just had the thought, "wait, what if..." and was promptly rewarded. I've been chasing that high ever since :)
From then on, my evening routine after school was connecting, picking the 3~4 games I wanted to play for that night, letting them load, disconnecting, and playing to my heart's content. If I hacked anything that fateful night, it was my parent's main excuse to get me off the computer!
The games you mention are Dexter's Laser Lab, Dexter's Labyrinth and Dexter MixMaster, by developers NetBabyWorld. Those games were originally their own game without the Cartoon Network branding. Labyrinth was based on Ninja Girl 1 and 2 and Dexter MixMaster was originally Tune Inn (that's why this one felt a bit off).
Since they were Shockwave based games they're not playable on modern browsers but they're playable with the Flashpoint Archive project. Huge timewaster, be careful. Better look for the games on YouTube :)
Hah, that explains the out-of-left-field theme! I had no idea they were reskins of exiting games. Interesting how child me managed to unknowingly zero in into the games of a single developer.!
And thanks for the game names as wel, although, I must admit that after posting that comment, I did go looking for them, and... Well, let's just say I've found my MixMaster skills to be quite rusty after all this time :p
This Dexter's Lab laser game was the first flash game I had ever played, and one of my first actual experiences with the internet. I remember seeing cartoonnetwork.com on the TV, understanding that there are games I could play online, and trying to figure out what the funny phone noises meant with AOL. Someone helped me go online using dialup and I ended up on the website somehow (probably struggling really badly to type as a kid) and it took forever for the flash game to load. At first I had little understanding of what I was looking at, felt very hard to understand websites. I also remember the Samurai Jack one really vividly, even took a note down of the game cheatcode on the TV and hid the note in a drawer after we moved and didn't have a PC anymore, because my parents said I'd have to wait "until I was a 18" to ever have an internet connection again. I was so little, I certainly lost it or someone tossed it, but we got a computer so I did end up enjoying the game a lot! I also really liked the HiHi Puffy Ami Yumi flash games, like the vacation one.
What a shame CN took their classic game sites down, when hosting flash games isn't even all that resource-intensive. An archive by them would've been nice. I recall every couple of years, older games slowly got removed which made me sad, until eventually flash died completely.
My goodness, I've come so far now in life. I know what tools to use to decompile flash games and look at the assets and logic, it's crazy to look back on how much games inspired me to learn about programming because I wanted to make my own.
To anyone who worked on these, thank you SO MUCH for having built them; you've definitely had a positive influence on countless people who were mentally stimulated and learned about how to use computers more in an effort to play them.
I made this port, thanks for sharing it! The reason this game doesn't appear in the original list is because it was made in Shockwave, not Flash. I'm curious if there is any kind of emulator for Shockwave being worked on like what Ruffle is for Flash.
Thank you for being a part of my childhood then! I probably played (like everyone else my age) most if not all CN games. It's a shame they didn't do any sort of effort to preserve them officially.
So did I. Your username suggests we might be from the same country. If so, we must have worked for the same awful person of a boss!
(I briefly thought that maybe you were that awful person, but he wouldn't be caught dead in HN; his whole thing was to exploit and abuse the people who did the actual work and forbid them from taking credit or even mentioning the work in a CV)
Same, none of the ones I worked on. But I did more work for Nickelodeon than CN, so I'm not really surprised. I only remember one CN one I did, but I might have worked on two or three that I'd know if I saw them again...
There are very few from 2008-2012 which is when I was working on that.
Alas no. I worked on their Power Play downloadable system to embed games in a local player and also did stuff like add Mojo Jojo and new levels to games like Power Puff Girls Fast and the Flurrious. Fun times :)
I worked on their Power Play downloadable system to embed games in a local player and also did stuff like add Mojo Jojo and new levels to games like Power Puff Girls Fast and the Flurrious. They had a mini golf game with a 3d golf club I embedded that I spent more time playing than working on :)
Oh wow.. No DLCs.. No seasons.. No paid content. Just content.. No advertisements outside of the whole game being what it is.. This is actually amazing to see.. These days, with these amazing machines, amazing frameworks, and all the possibilities, and we're now aiming not to provide experiences that are enjoyable on their own merit, but something else.. the "joy" part is a checkbox that's prioritized only to the lowest viable point, because the content is something else, it's advertisement or user-retention or user-capture or just plain old data-harvesting.. Sure, flash was a security nightmare, but the technology was amazing, on the same 100 pentium machine that struggeled with letting Coral zoom in on a part of a vector image, Flash would happily fill the screen with animation done using morphing vectors..
I remember that day, when news told that Apple wouldn't allow Flash.. I remember thinking, that was the beginning of the end.
Yes, it was proprietary, and all of that, but it was really, really good for its time, and it's still good.
So much culture.. So much zeitgeist. Locked into files of that era.
of course I have an adblocker, have you tried going online anytime the past 20 years ??? also, I don't know how to install chrome extensions on firefox so that's probably not for me.
My comment was not about that site itself, but about its content and that someone cared to share the link to it :)
RIP to TV networks and other media entities having free online computer games. Clone-a-doodle-doo and code of the samarai were my games.
ESPN also used to have great flash games. they had one where you'd skate on the roofs of houses and one where you had a BMX game that I think had a racing version and a freestyle version.
I learned a lot making these games while studying compsci. The platformer had a custom physics engine and I recall the pizza city open world was challenging to optimize for me at the time. Super fun to work on and appreciated the opportunity to work on these for PixelJam. These games were for comedy network and adult swim so in the same vein.
Most of the teagames flash games are sadly lost, never found them archived even here, yet they were among the best for me, e.g. Top Dog II was so fun back in the day. Teagames was taken over I think and the old games are all lost.
There is a web version of Flashpoint called 9o3o on https://ooooooooo.ooo/browse. If you click a game and then open your browser devtools and search for "data-game-zip", you will find the link to the game files in that attribute. Download and extract it and go to town.
Yeah that's the biggest issue with Flashpoint. AFAIK many games are hardcoded to load files from certain URLs and Flashpoint does patches & emulations of server calls. Support for sytems other than Windows is also wonky...
Thanks for whoever preserved these! The CartoonNetwork website was one of my most fondest memories from my childhood.
These days the official website redirects to their YouTube channel which I feel is very sad. There used to be places for kids on the internet, now everything is heading towards major platforms which I honestly feel is going to be damaging the youth in the long term.
Does anyone remember that Gorillaz flash game? You basically just had a dune buggy and drove around in a 3D world over some randomly scattered obstacles and terrain.
YOU wrote gorilla.bas?! That’s so cool. Sneaking into the library computer at school to play and later edit and remix that game was a formative experience for me.
I remember being introduced to QBASIC as a kid, and at the time the use of extended ASCII characters for the graphics in Nibbles.bas was legit next-level to me.
Yes! I was just about to comment the same thing. I sank so many hours into that Dragon Ball Z game. Was called Dragon Ball Z Tournament. And its background music was an instrumental version of Sisqo's Thong Song. Wild.
Neat, but Ruffle failed to load the first game I tried, with reasoning that there is possibly no file to load.
And then I was blocked by Cloudflare, even though there were no Cloudflare scripts to enable (checking in an alternate browser).
edit: It looks like uBlock origin sees the cloudflare scripts, but NoScript does not (and did not display 3 scripts) initially. I'll have to try again later.
I think part of it also is that, games with the same scope of flash games are still being made, but they're being made for phones which is where the customers. Flash games were the perfect mobile game before mobile games existed.
But the magic was that flash games were created on the same machines they were made on, so curious players (often kids!) had a natural funnel in to dabbling with the creation side, so whole communities of creatives formed naturally.
I don't know how we can solve this disconnect between creation and consumption :(
Sure there's many apps that let you build content from phones (swift playgrounds, other game-making apps, and now a whole gold rush of agentic prompting app-building apps...) but a phone is inherently non-immersive so I don't know how a creator can ever get into a flow state of building content on a phone itself.
But also we possibly just miss being teens on computers.
When I was eighteen, I went to Something Awful, Newgrounds, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, GameTrailers, Cinemassacre, YouTube, and SpoonyExperiment daily. Nowadays it's basically just YouTube for all that stuff (though I haven't watched Spoony for quite awhile).
Newgrounds is still around, I probably should make more of an effort to go there, and I do have stairs in my house, but I definitely don't go on as many different sites as I used to.
I certainly miss the days when everyone had their own web page.
some of these were actually pretty fun... i can't remember any of the names, but there were a few that were like pretty big adventure games that took like a couple hours to get through that i remember enjoying as a kid. and the best part? you could download the game and then run it offline so that you don't hog the family home phone line! :)
I played the CN flash games so much as a kid. Between that and Armor Games, Nitrome, Crazy Monkey Games, etc - I was spoiled for content. It does make me sad to see so much of it lost to time - though I also understand flash was bad and really did have to die.
Tried the Courage the Cowardly Dog game, after a nicely animated plane-landing, the game logic was broken and no enemies appeared. Never played the original, perhaps it had the same problem :)
Adult Swim Games was its own publisher and Robot Unicorn Attack was their breakout, but they kept shipping past Flash with stuff like Duck Game and Headlander. Worth its own exhibit, honestly.
Interesting approach. The key question for adoption is usually about the migration path — how painful is it for existing teams to switch, and what does the intermediate state look like?
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