Certainly not a community, but enough people that it undeniably made a dent in the universe. Anyone going to the Hot Wheels: Beat That launch party?) And yet a decade later, you can find corners of the internet that enjoyed the Hot Wheels game. (My friends and I thought this was hilarious. September 25th was also the ten-year anniversary of Hot Wheels: Beat That, a game so totally engulfed by the enormous black hole of Halo that it basically didn’t exist. Days later, it was September 25th, the ten-year anniversary of the massive global release of Halo 3, one of the most commercially successful games ever. Their experiences – and the experiences of Dan and Andre, working on a game with clashing artistic visions – are as valid as those of the myriad people affected by Star Wars or Final Fantasy. Bunni reached someone, and however accidentally, it made a difference in the lives of two girls on the other side of the globe. (Seriously.) But the core of the story is Kris and her childhood friend who bonded over this strange, cobbled-together game. The game’s two developers Dan and Andre never saw eye-to-eye: Dan wanted to do a satire of materialistic love, while Andre made something way more flippant and then disappeared into the Outback. Bunni disappeared from the web in 2014, and the saga of how the game was made, lost, and recovered is terrific. On last week’s episode of the podcast Reply All, 20-year-old Serbian listener Kris shared how she found the lost Flash game Bunni: How We First Met. Or, really, whose history should be told. It’s about recognizing the value of disposable culture and embracing more perspectives on what history should be told. The importance isn’t specific developers or publishers or games. We have to remember why we’re trying to save all that. The mission to preserve Flash content is enormous – not only creating a free, open way for modern browsers to understand Flash (like Mozilla’s abandoned Shumway project) but also finding websites with Flash content that will probably disappear soon. Thousands and thousands of Flash games exist, and like any creative works, keeping them accessible is a worthwhile endeavor. Gigantic collections, like nearly the entire library of the game platform Kongregate, will rapidly become obsolete.

When Adobe announced plans to discontinue Flash earlier this year, people rightly mourned that we’d soon lose the ability to easily play over two decades of amateur games and animation.

Bunni how we first met 2015