Nintendo's Classic Promotional Flash Games Are Coming Back
Nintendo's classic promotional flash games are being given new life thanks to one devoted fan. Modder, YouTuber, and Nintendo aficionado Skelux revealed that he has been working on restoring all of them in a video on his YouTube channel.
According to Skelux, he has retrieved the game files piece by piece using the Wayback Machine. These include titles such as "Zelda: Wind Waker" and "Animal Crossing: Wild World - Trivia."
Skelux searched the internet, scouring it for missing game files He then compiled the files into working games, giving them a second life for everyone to enjoy for free on his online game archive.
In the past several weeks, he managed to piece together over 30 of Nintendo's older promotional titles such as "Metroid Prime Hunters - Know Your Enemy," "Donkey Kong Country," and "Mario Kart Double Dash." He is still working on a number of other classic titles continuously searching the web in the hopes of restoring them.
Die-hard Nintendo fans can also lend a hand in the search with Skelux offering a $50 bounty for anyone resourceful enough to recover the remaining game files. So far, however, only one person was able to recover the missing data.
The release of Adobe's Flash plugin provided a way to deliver rich web content that was widely adopted in the early 2000s era of the internet. It was not long before it was also used by companies like Disney and Nintendo to create interactive content for promoting upcoming releases, usually in the form of small interactive website modules and mini-games.
Given that these games were only available online and at the mercy of the publishers who made them, it was inevitable that they eventually disappeared without a trace. The popularity of Flash itself also waned over the years and dedicated Flash-based game websites were often deleted once they had aged past the release they were designed to promote.
Thanks to Skelux, fans can relive Flash's glory days and enjoy the games it once brought to life.