A couple of years ago, an archivist named Ben Latimore put out an ebook. Since Adobe began the retirement of Flash in 2017, he’s been preserving .SWF files and the history around them. His book is a chronicle of the Flash era, which he sees as a lost golden age. On the final page, he wrote this about that time:
>… intense creativity, easy-to-access software, notable but not crippling limitations, almost universal compatibility across the entire technological space of its time, widespread adoption by encouraging free consumption and sharing in an age where “going viral” actually meant something, all combining to influence the entire entertainment industry with one strike after another? That’s something that we’ll never be able to recreate, only remember fondly. All driven by a bunch of guys sitting in their bedrooms who watched too much Xiao Xiao.
> Zhu initially won in court. Then the appeals process ran until 2006, when he finally lost. The stick figures were too different, according to the judges, and the imagery was too simple to copyright. Nike was in the clear.
I am sure if I add an extra couple of pixels to the end of the Nike Swoosh, I can use it for my own branding everywhere, because it is not the same and a rounded tick is just too simple to copyright in any case ... /sarcasm
I could even cite the original ruling against Zhu as a precedent for extra kharma points.
It's not about right or wrong, it's about how many lawyers you can afford. If you can afford lots of lawyers, you can run out the clock, drain your opponents budgets, craft laws and lobby for their passage, and all sorts of creative ways of getting around doing the right thing.
A random creator in China in the early oughts wouldn't have a chance in hell against Nike or any other big corporations, trademark and copyright isn't and wasn't set up for foreign citizens to leverage IP against domestic entities. Without starting with a big legal team and a US corporation and having all the reams of paperwork and registrations and forms in triplicate, he just wasn't playing the same game. He should have been reimbursed or gotten a royalty, from a moral standpoint, but he didn't have any valid legal standing.
A court tried to be generous in the interpretation of the law in order to grant him his first victory, and that would probably have been a good precedent, but the law isn't really designed to be flexible like that - it's very rare that "the right thing" ends up congruent with how the law works in practice.
The product itself still exists as Adobe Animate, I think (or one of the Adobe CC tools). It's just as good or better than it ever was, with the same workflow. But instead of exporting to SWF now people just export to video and share it on video platforms. Lots of great stuff still being done with it on Youtube.
We could have kept that creative environment (that seem to just disappear without any alternative to this day) while leaving videos to evolve as they did.
People here complain like they have issues with long term memory, but reality was - there was no real web video before. That apple had more issues than others was problem that should have been contained to apple walled garden alone. World was, is and will be much larger than that.
I used to make animations with https://pivotanimator.net/ a lot as a kid, trying to make fight scenes like these. A sort of related thing is ToriBash, which is kind of a multiplayer 3D animation game where you fight each other by making decisions on which muscles to contract at each time interval.
Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".
if you liked toribash, also check out Your Only Move Is Hustle (or YOMI hustle) which is similarly 'turn based' but in 2d. Closest thing I've found to playable Xiao Xiao.
Yep, had Pivot on a disk. Countless hours lost making my own sprites, and I remember the joy of downloading other peoples sprites that were actually good
Ah, XiaoXiao. Under the amazingly named `E:\Storage\Old\Fun\old\XiaoXiao` I have
fight (xiaoxiao1).avi, XiaoXiao_City_Plaza.swf, and xiaoxiao2.swf - xiaoxiao9.swf
I'm jealous. My files from those days did not survive; too many hard drive failures and lost or destroyed CDs.
This is particularly sad to me because I dabbled in Flash animation too back then, since I was in art school at the time. None of my creations survived. Some were even acceptable work.
This unlocked memories I forgot I had. Not only playing these games, but Flash introduced me to gamedev. I can clearly remember struggling in Actionscript, trying to get collision detection and resolution working. I never got it to work properly lol.
By the way, if anyone wants to relive some old flash games/movies, there is https://ruffle.rs/, an open source Flash implementation. It's great!
Man the Flash era, and the overall vibe of creativity on the internet back then (hey it was only 20 years ago), was the kind where you could feel a limitless potential for the future, where everyone would be awesome.
Then it all congealed into the tentacles of 4-5 corporations and now we're forever stuck in their "How do you do fellow kids" cringefest..
AI also ha[s/d] potential, but it's already getting crippled at birth by corporate idiocy and lawsuit fever.
Is there anywhere you can watch these old flash creations like Xiao Xiao and Homestar Runner with the original vector graphics? The reproductions I’ve seen on YouTube are terrible, in part because of the obvious video artifacts that don’t preserve the edges, but also because it loses all interactivity.
The versions linked to in the article use the original vector graphics. In fact I think they're the original post location (NewGrounds). From there you can follow the link to the author's page, which has them all:
I assumed this was going to be about Stick Death but I was mistaken! I had never heard of XiaoXiao before this article...
Stick Death was online when I first starting used the WWW, I was obsessed with it! It was just incredibly to me that someone could easily make these animations and get them online for everyone to see! I believe this around the same time as 2advanced and the "Flash intro" craze...
I was knee-deep in the flash animation scene through the late 90s early 00s, and I don't remember anyone calling anyone 'Flashers'. China-only I suppose.
I did think Stick Death came out before Xiao Xiao?
There’s not much in the group gallery now, so probably I was looking in the individual galleries of some of the members and I think some of the time some member would make something and post it to Albino Blacksheep and sites like that and maybe post a journal entry about it to their own individual journal on their own profile.
deviantArt also had IRC-like group chats. Flashers had a chat room. There’s a link to it still in the about section of the group, but that link doesn’t work any more. Even if a group didn’t have much posted into its gallery they could have a lot of member activity in those chat rooms. And from what I remember, I think I visited the flashers chat room a few times and that it was pretty active.
I think some chat rooms were private, and some were open even to people who were not in any particular group.
These animations got me into Flash and soon after into programming thanks to ActionScript, one copycat music video that maybe made even stronger impression in teenage me was a sad adult-themed music video from 2004, I just found ii after looking online for a bit: I love death - Lodger (Finnish band) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BoFQV4jXun4
I made a few Flash animations and a couple made it to and MTV show here in Latin America called "Flash MTV" that featured some of the animations people sent them, unfortunately I no longer have a copy of any of them and they don't seem to be online, although you can find some made by other people on YouTube.
My initial career idea was to become an animator but I found forums of senior animators complaining about low wages and long hours and it made me second guess myself about all that and I slowly picked up programming instead, I did get a copy of a great book called "The Animator's Survival Kit" by Richard Williams, best known for directing "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", the book still lives in my library and I hold it in great steem.
SFDT was the first online community I was a part of. It was a special time on the early internet. I feel so lucky to have been a very small part of it.
Can't believe this is the only mention of sfdt so far on this thread. I have similar nostalgia about it being the first online community I joined. Collaborating with others, getting a glimpse into their personal lives, chatting off-platform on MSN/AIM. I wonder if that experience exists for kids in the modern day internet...
You can intentionally seek out such places today, but the average internet denizen sticks to a few known mass communities. If someone is lucky, they get involved in a small subreddit or group chat.
Group chats are the closest thing we have to that experience today, but they're probably more socially-oriented on average, unlike the groups I rolled with back in the aughts which were all heavily creative- and fandom-oriented.
That's so cool. I watched all of his work, and was in the animation scene, and I didn't even realize at the time, the creator is Chinese! I learned how to use Flash, dabbled into scripts, learned to do very basic stuff on 3DSMax, as a ~10 year old little shit, and all of that most likely wouldn't have happened, if it wasn't for his work -- it's safe to say that my life was dramatically impacted by him. Thanks for sharing this, OP!
I was going to mention MTV's Liquid Television animation showcase as a potential inspiration for this.
That link seems partly confirmed since they mention an online predecessor called Stick Figure Death Theatre and the Liquid Television segment (which re-enacted famous movie scenes with stick figure animations) was called Stick Figure Theatre.
Pretty much each individual segment of that show was mind blowing (it launched Beavid and Butthead) but the stick figure interpretation of Night of he Living Dead stuck with me for years.
Some tools were certainly better, like Flash. Mobile made a lot of things complicated. Half the game dev tools still don't run properly for mobile. HTML5 was supposed to make things easier, and for a while it did, but it got rapidly more complicated afterwards.
Some things are much better today, like Procreate.
I dont think HTML5 was supposed to make things easier. It is just that major players wanted to get rid of flash for own reason (some of them valid) and HTML5 was something they were able to point at. It was never easier or even half replacement, it was significantly more complicated and crappier experience for an average normal creator.
It never even got some convincing demo. All those I have seen at the time were the "spend a lot more time to produce something much less impressive" kind of anti demos.
No, and a lot of Flash projects have already been converted; notably, Google was one of the first to release a flash-to-html5 converter, because a lot of ads were Flash at the time.
But Adobe's missed opportunity was keeping Flash alive, "just" adding a html5 / canvas / JS version instead of the browser plug-ins that were killed when smartphones/tablets refused to support them.
Stick figures run through a lot of amateur digital animation, for probably obvious reasons. Pivot reigned on a lot of early YouTube and the stubby stick figure style ran through a lot of Flipnote Hatena. I'm not sure if it's simply that standards for amateur digital content have evolved, or if we have lost the character of small platforms like SFDT and Flipnote, but I do find stick figures absent today on the large platforms we've all herded towards. A lot of what I see is definitely buoyed by Flipnote diehards.
Ah man, these are some awesome memories! Hot damn I liked these when I was a kid! I was first introduced to them on a LAN party. We would pass these kinds of things to eachother between CS 1.5 matches (VLC can play any file format!)
I remember towards the end of my lan party going days, these sick fights were finally outdone by the much more advanced Killer Bean.
Was not expecting to read about Xiao Xiao today! I loved Xiao Xiao as a preteen, and spent many hours playing Xiao Xiao 4 [1], or re-watching the other Xiao Xiaos over and over again.
I remember a “choose your own story” stick figure Flash app, called Time to Die (I believe), where the “protagonist” was a condemned convict, used as target practice by scientists.
You could pick weapons used by the scientists. In most, he’d just get blown away, but in one scenario, he grabs the gun, and kills everyone in the facility.
Not sure if it was this guy, or was just inspired by him.
i was OBSSESSSED with this growing up. i had no idea about the origin or real name or that it was chinese origin. incredible. thanks to whoever found and submitted this
I grew up learning Flash and started my love for programming due to ActionScript 2 then 3, is there anything like this today I am looking for something for my 10 year old daughter.
the Xiao Xiao Flash series were amazing. I always wondered when someone would come up with a beat'em-up game with that style. Simple, fast-paced, lots of free movement and use of tools/weapons.
I remember series of stick man fighting cartoons which starts from simple kung-fu/gun porno in big office tower of (presumably) evil corporation, but progressed to some infernal fights, with Jesus, ghosts, hell, etc.
I'm not sure it was XiaoXiao, I (don't) remember some other letter combination in the names of files.
And most people weren’t talking about it, but it’s inevitable that some were, and I guess that’s you. Surely you’re not surprised about all the times when you’re not talking about something that then shows up on HN?
You talk about stuff everyday, and stuff shows up on HN everyday, eventually they’ll coincide.
> It was the era when a major company could brush off the bad PR that comes with copying a major online artist. Is it believable that no one involved in the Nike ads had seen Xiao Xiao? Not really — it was popular with young people worldwide. Yet Zhu was new media at a time when old media ruled. What could he do?
This doesn't make any sense. From earlier in the same article:
> Zhu didn’t invent violent stickman animations. In the ‘90s, the Western site Stick Figure Death Theatre hosted exactly what its name implied. But Xiao Xiao, and its mix of Jackie Chan with Jet Li with The Matrix, perfected the idea.
> Either way, it was Xiao Xiao that made “stick fights” massive online. Clones were rampant — even Stick Figure Death Theatre had them. As one paper reported in 2002:
>> The Web’s legions of part-time Flash animators have begun producing their own copies of Xiao Xiao — so many, in fact, that there’s a whole portal dedicated to them. Stick Figure Death Theatre ... has so many stick man knockoffs, you have to wonder why Zhu doesn’t just give up.
If we assume that people at Nike were familiar with Xiao Xiao... and that they were also familiar with the mountains of similar material, what are we saying they did wrong?
Oh man I knew exactly what it was when I read the title. Xiao Xiao (and Madness) was the best. Watched them over and over again with friends on my family dell. What a great memory.
Loved Madness, surprised it didn’t get more mentions here. The combination of over the top violence, techno music and hints at a deeper underlying story is what made the series stick for me even more than Xiao Xiao.
>… intense creativity, easy-to-access software, notable but not crippling limitations, almost universal compatibility across the entire technological space of its time, widespread adoption by encouraging free consumption and sharing in an age where “going viral” actually meant something, all combining to influence the entire entertainment industry with one strike after another? That’s something that we’ll never be able to recreate, only remember fondly. All driven by a bunch of guys sitting in their bedrooms who watched too much Xiao Xiao.
https://archive.org/details/flashpoint-a-tribute-to-web-game...
I am sure if I add an extra couple of pixels to the end of the Nike Swoosh, I can use it for my own branding everywhere, because it is not the same and a rounded tick is just too simple to copyright in any case ... /sarcasm
I could even cite the original ruling against Zhu as a precedent for extra kharma points.
A random creator in China in the early oughts wouldn't have a chance in hell against Nike or any other big corporations, trademark and copyright isn't and wasn't set up for foreign citizens to leverage IP against domestic entities. Without starting with a big legal team and a US corporation and having all the reams of paperwork and registrations and forms in triplicate, he just wasn't playing the same game. He should have been reimbursed or gotten a royalty, from a moral standpoint, but he didn't have any valid legal standing.
A court tried to be generous in the interpretation of the law in order to grant him his first victory, and that would probably have been a good precedent, but the law isn't really designed to be flexible like that - it's very rare that "the right thing" ends up congruent with how the law works in practice.
Still find it incredibly sad that Adobe and Steve Jobs were able to destroy it together.
This tool was able to draw in creative, previously non-technical people and provide a gradual ramp of complexity that we could navigate.
Nothing has come close since.
This was months before the iPhone announcement.
I can see why they killed it.
Google were ok with "works but janky af", but Apple weren't.
People here complain like they have issues with long term memory, but reality was - there was no real web video before. That apple had more issues than others was problem that should have been contained to apple walled garden alone. World was, is and will be much larger than that.
Yes the games and videos were cool, but 99% of the usage of Flash was awful ads and UI/UX elements.
Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".
If memory serves, the sound effects were a fantastic touch on top of the multiplayer hilarity of that game.
Looks like there's still an active community around it today, based on a cursory YouTube search.
This is particularly sad to me because I dabbled in Flash animation too back then, since I was in art school at the time. None of my creations survived. Some were even acceptable work.
The videos directly there are a bunch of internet famous things, some of them in German:
Basshunter_Boten_Anna_German.avi, PatchMeUpMusicVideoByRootKit-GeekVideo.avi, trafo-entkopplung.avi, wow_forporn.avi, fainting goats.flv, gangbang.flv, Gruftis1989.flv, hape kerkeling.flv, HumanCamera.flv, Wii.vs.PS3.flv, der_stack.m4v, hacker_packen_aus.m4v, 3dshot.mov, ACUVUE_Hearts_on_Fire.mov, AtheistenOnly - JesusVideo.mov, fsm-spotting.mpg, Stroh.flv.MPG, tetris.mpg, test.swf, theresheis.swf, blowdarts.wmv, einsteinthebird.wmv, FLURL-dot-com-30292-Mafia.wmv, FLURL-dot-com-50776-korn_mosh.wmv, FLURL-dot-com-51227-pop.wmv, getalife.wmv, hamburgertrick.wmv, insane.wmv, mariopiano.wmv, nintendochoir.wmv, SOAD_gremlins.wmv, supersoakerflamethrower.wmv, theglasstrick.wmv, TRANIX.NET-11-String-Bass.wmv
"gangbang.flv" is some French movie student project "Revenge of the Gangbang Zombies", not actual porn ;)
The Fun\old folder has these:
Folders: CS ft. Southpark, Dela&Ort, HTF, Knight Rider, Lenore, XiaoXiao
Files: AYB.swf, AYS.swf, beer.swf, c_d_mmorpg.swf, cow.swf, crab.swf, cruise.swf, dengdeng.swf, fuckher.swf, hhonda-ad-300k.swf, humor_pong.swf, knowjackschitt.swf, metaluohigh.swf, optical.exe, rgb.swf, starwarz.swf, trafikskolen.swf, urbanlegends.swf, winrg.swf
By the way, if anyone wants to relive some old flash games/movies, there is https://ruffle.rs/, an open source Flash implementation. It's great!
Then it all congealed into the tentacles of 4-5 corporations and now we're forever stuck in their "How do you do fellow kids" cringefest..
AI also ha[s/d] potential, but it's already getting crippled at birth by corporate idiocy and lawsuit fever.
https://zhu.newgrounds.com/
https://homestarrunner.com/main
Using Ruffle. Like the others, it's somewhat recent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestar_Runner#cite_ref-18
[0]: https://ruffle.rs/
[1]: https://ruffle.rs/compatibility
Stick Death was online when I first starting used the WWW, I was obsessed with it! It was just incredibly to me that someone could easily make these animations and get them online for everyone to see! I believe this around the same time as 2advanced and the "Flash intro" craze...
I did think Stick Death came out before Xiao Xiao?
The group hasn’t been active for many years now it looks like, but the group page still exists.
https://www.deviantart.com/flashers
Group founded 2004.
There’s not much in the group gallery now, so probably I was looking in the individual galleries of some of the members and I think some of the time some member would make something and post it to Albino Blacksheep and sites like that and maybe post a journal entry about it to their own individual journal on their own profile.
deviantArt also had IRC-like group chats. Flashers had a chat room. There’s a link to it still in the about section of the group, but that link doesn’t work any more. Even if a group didn’t have much posted into its gallery they could have a lot of member activity in those chat rooms. And from what I remember, I think I visited the flashers chat room a few times and that it was pretty active.
I think some chat rooms were private, and some were open even to people who were not in any particular group.
Definitely remember Stick Death in highschool around '99-'01, 2+ years before this flashers group supposedly started.
Sometimes, they interact with real world too!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npTC6b5-yvM
"Animation vs Physics"[1] was video which got started me with the channel. The presentation is beautiful there!
[1]: https://youtu.be/ErMSHiQRnc8
I even made this terrible thing as my first foray into AS2:
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408469
My initial career idea was to become an animator but I found forums of senior animators complaining about low wages and long hours and it made me second guess myself about all that and I slowly picked up programming instead, I did get a copy of a great book called "The Animator's Survival Kit" by Richard Williams, best known for directing "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", the book still lives in my library and I hold it in great steem.
Group chats are the closest thing we have to that experience today, but they're probably more socially-oriented on average, unlike the groups I rolled with back in the aughts which were all heavily creative- and fandom-oriented.
Also anyone else remember when websites used to make Flash intros that you'd have to skip to get to the content?
That link seems partly confirmed since they mention an online predecessor called Stick Figure Death Theatre and the Liquid Television segment (which re-enacted famous movie scenes with stick figure animations) was called Stick Figure Theatre.
Pretty much each individual segment of that show was mind blowing (it launched Beavid and Butthead) but the stick figure interpretation of Night of he Living Dead stuck with me for years.
YouTube has a compilation: https://youtu.be/-M7-Sew5aU8
I sometimes wonder why such concepts went away, and everything became far more complicated.
Some things are much better today, like Procreate.
It never even got some convincing demo. All those I have seen at the time were the "spend a lot more time to produce something much less impressive" kind of anti demos.
But Adobe's missed opportunity was keeping Flash alive, "just" adding a html5 / canvas / JS version instead of the browser plug-ins that were killed when smartphones/tablets refused to support them.
I remember towards the end of my lan party going days, these sick fights were finally outdone by the much more advanced Killer Bean.
Just a bean, trying to get some sleep.
Those were the days
I'm so happy people still remember it. We used to watch 2.1 at every LAN, too.
[1] https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/25718
You could pick weapons used by the scientists. In most, he’d just get blown away, but in one scenario, he grabs the gun, and kills everyone in the facility.
Not sure if it was this guy, or was just inspired by him.
Godot might be today's analogue for games.
Thanks for reminding me of that one
for some extra nostalgia, check out "one finger death punch 2" game (and its prequel). i bet it's sort of an homage to those animations.
I'm not sure it was XiaoXiao, I (don't) remember some other letter combination in the names of files.
You talk about stuff everyday, and stuff shows up on HN everyday, eventually they’ll coincide.
This doesn't make any sense. From earlier in the same article:
> Zhu didn’t invent violent stickman animations. In the ‘90s, the Western site Stick Figure Death Theatre hosted exactly what its name implied. But Xiao Xiao, and its mix of Jackie Chan with Jet Li with The Matrix, perfected the idea.
> Either way, it was Xiao Xiao that made “stick fights” massive online. Clones were rampant — even Stick Figure Death Theatre had them. As one paper reported in 2002:
>> The Web’s legions of part-time Flash animators have begun producing their own copies of Xiao Xiao — so many, in fact, that there’s a whole portal dedicated to them. Stick Figure Death Theatre ... has so many stick man knockoffs, you have to wonder why Zhu doesn’t just give up.
If we assume that people at Nike were familiar with Xiao Xiao... and that they were also familiar with the mountains of similar material, what are we saying they did wrong?