Shockwave.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

shockwave.com launched on 2 august 1999 as macromedia's flagship destination for the shockwave plugin. shockwave was the older, heavier sibling of flash. it could do 3D and longer audio. it could run more complex authored content than the swf player could in 1999. shockwave.com was the showcase site for what the plugin was capable of, and it became one of the dominant casual gaming portals on the early web.

the site grew through the 2000s as a slightly more corporate alternative to newgrounds. by the end of 2005 it claimed 22 million unique monthly visitors. macromedia merged with atom corporation in 2001 to form atom shockwave, which became atom entertainment, which mtv bought for 200 million dollars in 2006. mtv flipped it to defy media, which sold it to addicting games in 2018. the brand passed through five owners before its underlying technology was finally retired.

adobe announced on 13 february 2019 that it would discontinue the shockwave player on 9 april 2019. adobe gave the plugin one month of public notice. that day, the entire library of original shockwave-authored content on the site stopped working in browsers. the shockwave.com domain still exists, owned by addicting games and now enthusiast gaming, but the actual shockwave games died on 9 april 2019. the brand survived. the medium did not.

i used shockwave.com a few times in the early-broadband era around 2004-2007. ttnet at home, sometimes on a slower line at internet cafes. shockwave games took longer to load than flash games and the install warnings about needing the plugin were the main entry barrier. miniclip and newgrounds were what i actually opened. shockwave.com was something you arrived at from a magazine recommendation or a friend's link, played a couple games, then forgot about until next time.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

shockwave was macromedia director's runtime in the browser. director was a multimedia authoring tool from the cd-rom era. when macromedia ported the runtime to the web in 1995, the shockwave plugin let you embed director projects in html. that turned a generation of cd-rom multimedia developers into web game developers overnight. flash came later and was lighter. shockwave kept its niche by being more capable for 3D and large authored worlds.

shockwave.com hosted hundreds of original games. joe cartoon, dumbland by david lynch, several 3D arcade ports, disney brand showcases, lego playable demos all lived there. notable creators got equity stakes in the company, including trey parker and matt stone. the editorial bar was higher than newgrounds because macromedia was using the site to sell the plugin.

~ the long ownership chain ~

the ownership history is its own story. macromedia spun shockwave.com out into atom shockwave in 2001 by merging it with atom corporation. that became atom entertainment in 2006. mtv networks bought atom entertainment for 200 million dollars in august 2006 to compete with youtube and yahoo games. mtv ran it for eight years, then sold it to defy media in 2014 alongside other digital properties.

defy media collapsed in november 2018. shockwave.com was sold off to addicting games before defy went under. addicting games was itself sold to enthusiast gaming in 2021. the underlying brand has now lived under five different parent companies. by the end none of them were really investing in shockwave content; they were running it as a back-catalog flash-and-html5 portal.

~ how it died ~

adobe acquired macromedia in december 2005 and inherited both flash and shockwave. flash got most of the development attention because it was used for everything from video to advertising. shockwave was always a niche format for richer interactive content, and by the 2010s nobody was authoring new shockwave projects.

adobe quietly stopped shipping shockwave updates after 2014. by 2018 the player was an obvious dead-end, with no mac version since 2017 and no security patches. on 13 february 2019 adobe announced end-of-life for the shockwave player effective 9 april 2019. the public notice was 56 days. on 9 april 2019 the plugin stopped being available for download and existing installs got no further updates. all original shockwave content on shockwave.com became dead bytes.

~ what remains ~

the secondary plugin lesson. flash got most of the attention as the great deprecated browser plugin, and rightly so. but shockwave died first, in april 2019, with even less ceremony than flash got in december 2020. shockwave is the rehearsal for flash's death. one month of public notice, no migration path, an entire archive of authored content stranded.

the casual-gaming-portal era. between 1999 and 2010 the casual gaming web was a stack of plugin-powered portals (shockwave, miniclip, kongregate, newgrounds, yahoo games). each had its own taste. shockwave was the slick one, the one with disney and lego content, the one your school computer might actually let you load. that whole shape of casual web gaming is gone now. flashpoint preserves what it can. nothing replaces it.

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