One of the most formative things I've ever played, and it has such a pitifully small amounts of plays on here; though, I wouldn't fault anyone for overlooking it as a game. Many people are resistant to saying these kinds of projects are video games now, imagine how the conversation was all the way back in 2004. Perhaps it was the first time I ever really engaged with games as presented as art galleries, but I couldn't really tell you. 99Rooms is a complete interactive audiovisual project that strikes on all of the strengths of the Flash file type and early web medium with arguably no real downsides.

What it is, exactly, is a series of a hundred interactive rooms put together on a flash driven website. It takes industrial photography of, I want to say East German factory spaces (I think I once read this but can't confirm it through any of their official channels) and combines them with adventure game style pixel hunting puzzles and other cinematic feeling embellishments to immerse you deeper into the environments. Disturbing dark ambient drones playing, the graffiti on all of the walls separated as their own elements, moving, even themselves working as interactive objects, feeling as if they were alive, creating a haunted atmosphere.

One thing that really stands out to me about it today is how it has such a love for graffiti, really taking the time and effort to not just bring life into many of the scenes, but whimsy and humor. It's more than just the occasional wiggle and distortion of a work of art, but really trying to execute on what would work for a specific piece. Dangling dish on a hook to the tune of accordions and sea shanties, ink draining from a man taking a leak, pulsating and wriggling of bugs, and the slow sprawl of mold into unique patterns. To this day, I haven't even found anything remotely similar in execution, and this game is 22 years old now.

In 2004, it was still relatively new to be able to integrate flash into websites, and many such projects weren't very ambitious. Flash wasn't just used for games, but for functionality on websites in ways HTML broadly covers by itself now. The death of flash really took its toll on a lot of wonderful art and games out there, and while there are tools to preserve it, none of them I've found have properly been able to even load this game. For all of the creative ambition and pioneering nature of flash as a creative medium, a process, phenomenon tied into the very history of the web, it's really sad to see it effectively cast to the fringes and deeply undervalued as childhood nostalgia driven minigames one once played during school hours and not its own unique movement with works of value held to at least equivalent acclaim of your typical contemporaneous TIGS game that gets heaped with praise.

Even so, the novel fact of nostalgia is really undeniable, given how much time has passed, given how there is no current continuation of it as a movement, and how Adobe announced it was quietly killing what was once Flash, now called Adobe Animate. Though nominally now put on "Maintenance Mode" instead of being outright obliterated due to a backlash, it's safe to say Flash has hit the end of the road and can only be considered in the past tense. I just hope younger people in the future with an appreciation for earlier web art and games can look at this the way I did. First, when I was a kid impressed with the creepy atmosphere, and then again in college when I drew from it as an inspiration to create gritty industrial 3D environments.