I’ve seen a lot of folks concerned about what Flash’s retirement at the end of the year will mean for the copious amounts of BIONICLE Flash content we have on the site. Here’re the full details of what is going on, which I hope will alleviate some of your worries!

The Now

The biggest thing to know is that Flash is ONLY retiring in web browsers. You won’t be able to open up MNOG in Firefox or Chrome any longer (at least for the time being)… but there is still no issue with downloading and running it independent of your browser. As such, we thankfully don’t need to worry about losing access to any games.

To aid with making the download option for games more front and center, I’ve restructured the web games page so that each game has its own sub-page, with both streaming and download links. I hope this will be helpful.

Flash animations have already been mirrored in MP4 format on the site, so they will still be viewable as well. The one thing that will be kind of broken for a while will be Flash content on the websites we’ve archived. If you download a site and have a Flash projector on your computer, you can run the Flash objects independently. But as the HTML webpages need to be viewed in a browser, it will be tricky to see the Flash in place on the actual sites.

The Future

There are a number of Flash emulators in active development that should, eventually, allow us to re-integrate everything back onto the site in just the way it used to work. Internet Archive already has a growing collection of Flash games and animations running through Ruffle! So long-term, there is nothing to fear – none of the BIONICLE media on BMP will be permanently lost.

Thanks for bearing with us during this transition!