The Nostalgic Flash Game You Would Skip Class to Play Again

For about a decade, the best games on a school computer cost nothing and loaded in a browser tab. Newgrounds, Miniclip, Armor Games and Kongregate were full of them, and a lot of the people making them went on to build careers, studios and whole genres. Crush the Castle did the slingshot before Angry Birds, Crimson Room is credited with making escape-room games a genre, and Alien Hominid started on Newgrounds before it reached consoles.

Every game here has its own Wikipedia article and is listed there as a Flash game, and every one was first released free to play in a browser between 2000 and 2012. That rule keeps out the Facebook farms, the online worlds and the deluxe versions you had to buy, and keeps in the odd ones: a game where you are a fly, a love story about the moon, a quiz built entirely out of trick questions.

Each card plays footage of the game itself. The list runs roughly in release order, so the early Newgrounds era sits at the top and the last wave before mobile took over sits at the bottom. Pick the one you would still load up today.