Rinmaru Games

» see rinmarugames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Avatar makers were drawn for girls roughly between nine and sixteen, and a lot of them were built by one woman alone with a copy of Flash. In 2008 I was finishing university in Ankara, which is about as far from that audience as you can stand. Everything below is reconstruction.

The site opened in 2008 under the handle Rinmaru. The catalog started with avatar creators: you picked a face, then worked down through hair and eyes and clothing until the thing exported a character you could hang on a forum profile. Mega Anime Avatar Creator traveled furthest. The Manga Creator series came later, where you assembled a comic page panel by panel, and after that full visual novels with branching routes, the longest of them Ascension. By 2019 the homepage was pointing at game folders numbered into the five hundreds.

All of it ran on Flash, which meant all of it had a scheduled end from 25 July 2017, the day Adobe announced the plugin would stop in 2020.

~ the case file ~

~ the day it died ~

The Internet Archive caught this one close to the hour. At 18:01 UTC on 30 December 2020 the homepage was still the usual 4,867-byte game list, titled "Rinmaru Games - Online Story Games and Avatar Creators." At 01:36 UTC on 31 December it was 1,535 bytes and the title read "RinmaruGames - New Beginnings."

The new page was almost nothing. A logo at the top, one enormous image beneath it. At the bottom, a row of four outbound links. Everything the site had to say about itself was inside the image.

~ the goodbye nobody could read ~

The farewell is a painting, 2,103 by 2,898 pixels and five megabytes: a woman at the rail of a sailing ship at sunset, a small pink winged creature beside her, and a scroll unrolled over the lower two thirds of the frame.

The scroll opens with "Thank you everyone for the best 12 years a website owner could ever wish for!" Then comes the part that reframes the date. "It has been a little longer than a year since my last update here, as some of you must have noticed. This is because I've retired from dress up games and haven't been making them for a while. In a way, I've set sail to different adventures. Now, with the end of Adobe Flash, I feel it's time to make it official." Further down: "This was in no way an impulsive decision, although the timing was more than convenient." It is signed "-Rin."

Because that text lives inside a PNG, no search engine indexed a word of it and no text archive holds it. The Wayback Machine did take the file, at 01:40 UTC on 31 December 2020, four minutes after the page went up. Reading the goodbye in 2026 means downloading five megabytes and looking at it with your eyes.

~ where the games went ~

The four links at the bottom of that page were the succession plan. Doll Divine, another dress-up site, became the keeper of the Rinmaru Flash catalog and now serves it through Ruffle, the Flash emulator that runs in a browser tab. Meiker and DressUpGames.com took two more slots. The fourth went to LarkyLabs, the studio Rin set up for the visual novels she had already moved on to.

Ascension sits on the Internet Archive as a standalone download as well. So the catalog came out of 2020 in better shape than most Flash-era work, for the dull reason that its author arranged the handover before the deadline instead of after it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »