Adobe pulls the plug on Shockwave—no, not Shockwave Flash, which is different—today. Dating back to 1995 when it was named Macromedia Shockwave, this plugin was used for games, presentations, and other multimedia on the web.
RIP Shockwave
Adobe is discontinuing Shockwave today, on April 9, 2019. You can no longer download the Shockwave Player for Windows from Adobe, although enterprise customers with support contracts can use it for a few more years. The Shockwave Player for Mac was discontinued back in 2017. If you find an old website hosting Shockwave content, it isn’t playable with any officially supported software.
Luckily, the web has moved on from Shockwave, so Shockwave is something you’ll only see when browsing web pages from more than a decade ago.
Flash is still around for a while yet. Adobe plans to discontinue Flash by the end of 2020.
Adobe Shockwave vs. Adobe Flash
Both Shockwave and Flash were developed by Macromedia, a company Adobe acquired back in 2005. Each is a multimedia software platform with a web browser plugin. Shockwave content is played by the “Shockwave Player” plugin, while Flash content is played by the “Flash Player” plugin.
Shockwave has become largely irrelevant as Flash gained more and more of its abilities over the years. But the two products have different histories. Shockwave’s pedigree goes back further, all the way to VideoWorks for the original Apple Macintosh. CD-ROMs featuring point-and-click adventures and educational experiences created with Shockwave were popular in the early 90s and were created by Macromedia Director. The Shockwave Player plugin was released in 1995 to bring those features to the burgeoning web.
Macromedia introduced features targeted at the video game industry in 2001, and there’s a good chance you played a Shockwave game in your browser in the years after that. For example, Candystand.com was owned by Nabisco, the company behind Life Savers, and featured a variety of browser games that used Shockwave. The above YouTube video shows an officially licensed Donkey Kong Country game released in 2003. Yes, Nintendo created browser games in partnership with Life Savers candy.
The web was full of experiences like this—most of which have now been lost to time. Habbo Hotel was an online social community/virtual world aimed at teenagers. Habbo started out using Shockwave and later switched from Shockwave to Flash as the web moved on.
