The GROW Flash Games After Flash: What Survived

Most of the browser games people remember from the 2000s are gone in any practical sense: the plugin that ran them was switched off, and nobody ported them. The GROW games came through better than that, partly because their author saw it coming and partly because of what kind of games they are.

The part that survived is the mechanic, not the plugin, and it is cheap to rebuild — which is what we did. Island Evolution is a 2026 order puzzle that runs natively in the browser with no plugin, no download and no account: eight items, 40,320 orders, three of them perfect. Below is which of the originals are still playable, which are not, and why this particular genre outlived its runtime.

What happened to the GROW Flash games?

On Nakayama published the series at eyezmaze.com from February 2002 onward, all of it in Flash. Before the plugin was retired he moved much of the catalogue to HTML5, so the games kept working in ordinary browsers after Flash was gone. Several titles had already been rebuilt for phones between 2014 and 2015, which gave them a second independent life.

What stopped was new work. The main series ended with GROW Park in July 2015, the MiniGROW line ended with GROW Thanks in November 2018, and none of the games have been updated since 2020.

When exactly did Flash stop working?

Adobe ended support for Flash Player on December 31, 2020, after announcing the date three years earlier. In January 2021 a block inside the player began refusing to run Flash content at all, so even an old installed copy stopped being a way back in. Browsers had already been removing the plugin for years before that.

Two dates matter for anyone hunting an old game: end of support, which stopped the updates, and the block, which stopped the content. A page that still embeds a .swf file today will show you nothing regardless of which browser you try.

Which GROW games got HTML5 or mobile versions?

The mobile run covered a good share of the catalogue:

Title	Mobile release
GROW Cube	September 2014 (Android), October 2014 (iOS)
GROW RPG	April 2015
GROW ver.2, as GROW JUNGLE	April 2015 (Android), August 2015 (iOS)
GROW RECOVERY	April 2015, July 2015
GROW Park	July 2015 (Android), August 2015 (iOS)
GROW ORNAMENT	December 2015

GROW Cube being first is not a surprise, since it is the one most people played. The full catalogue with original release dates is in what GROW games are.

What is Ruffle, and does it help?

Ruffle is a Flash Player emulator written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, so it runs Flash content inside a modern browser without the original plugin. Because it is a reimplementation rather than a copy of Adobe's player, it does not carry the security history that got Flash removed in the first place.

It is also incomplete, and that is the part worth knowing before you go looking. Older ActionScript titles generally fare better than late ones, animation-heavy games can show missing effects, and support for any particular game is a question of whether that game happens to work yet. For a GROW game the HTML5 or mobile version, where one exists, is the version that will behave.

What does Flashpoint preserve?

Flashpoint is a preservation archive for web games and animations, covering Flash along with Shockwave, Java, Unity Web Player and other retired plugins. It works by running the content locally through its own launcher rather than expecting a live website to still be there, and it holds tens of thousands of titles.

Archives like this are the reason the era is recoverable at all. They are built for preservation rather than for a quick game in a browser tab, so they suit someone reconstructing a lost favourite more than someone with ten minutes to spare.

Why did the series stop before Flash did?

The timeline is the wrong way round from what people assume. Flash was retired at the end of 2020, but the main GROW series had already finished in July 2015, and the last small entry, GROW Thanks, appeared in November 2018. By the time the plugin died the series had been quiet for two years.

So Flash is not the reason there are no new GROW games, and a working emulator would not produce another one. What the plugin's retirement threatened was access to the back catalogue, and that threat was answered by the HTML5 and mobile versions rather than by anything Adobe did. The games we can still play are the ones somebody rebuilt on purpose.

Why do order puzzles outlive their runtime?

A GROW game is a turn-based dependency puzzle with one input: which item is next. There is no physics, no networking, no frame-perfect timing and no controller mapping, so the part of the design that matters carries over to any technology that can draw a picture and register a click. The rules fit on a page.

That is why the genre keeps reappearing while the platforms underneath it get replaced. An arcade shooter tuned to a Flash player's quirks loses something real in a port. A puzzle whose whole content is the sequence you choose loses nothing.

What is worth playing now?

If you want the original article, GROW Cube in its HTML5 or mobile form is the one to start with, and the reasoning it demands is unpacked in why the order is the entire puzzle in GROW Cube. The 2007 commission for a Tokyo engineering school is a stranger piece of history and is covered in GROW Island explained.

If you want a new one, that is what we have been building. Island Evolution takes the same mechanic, publishes its requirement table in the evolution chart, keeps the answer to itself, and runs in a browser with no plugin in sight.

Where do these facts come from?

• Adobe's own end-of-life notice for Flash Player, for the December 31, 2020 date and the January 2021 block.
• The GROW (series) entry on Wikipedia, for the mobile release dates and the HTML5 transition.
• The Ruffle and Flashpoint projects, for what each one does.

Island Evolution is an independent game with no affiliation to Eyezmaze or On Nakayama. The GROW series is their work.