It's hard to believe now but there was once a time before Macromedia Flash was used for anything ranging from animation to games like Tower Defense and Party Bingo. The year was 1996. It was a dark time, an age where R. Kelly and Ricky Martin ruled the air waves and the Internet was overloaded with Angelfire and Live Journal. Then along came Jonathan Gay to save us from boring, pixilated web design.
Jonathan Gay's childhood love of Legos drove him into game design and program. One such game he wrote in High School, Beyond Dark Castle, became such a hit that it paid for his way through college. In 1995 Jonathan created a software, called FutureSplash, that would allow people to send graphics and animation over the Internet, a revolutionary concept at the time. A year later MSN and Disney Online would use this software for their sites. In December, 1996 FutureSplash was sold to Macromedia and FutureSplash Animator became Flash 1.0.
Flash has since evolved from a Web drawing package to a multimedia powerhouse. Flash games like “Bejeweled” are played by thousands of players online. Countless hours have been spent playing such games and millions of dollars of ad revenue has been generated as a result.