20 years of blogging: a two-decade journey through web gaming history

Talking about Actionscript 3, Flash, Game development, HTML5 and Phaser.

Today marks a milestone I honestly never thought I’d reach when I typed my very first post: www.emanueleferonato.com is officially 20 years old.

Two decades. In internet years, that’s practically ancient.

I’m not a fan of self-congratulatory speeches, so I won’t bore you with a list of personal achievements. Instead, I want to use this milestone to look back at the incredible, volatile, and fascinating evolution of web gaming from 2006 to today; a history that this blog has had the privilege of documenting step by step.

Here is what the world looked like through the lens of a web developer over the last 20 years.

2006 – 2010: The Golden Age of Flash

When this blog started in 2006, the web was a playground powered by Adobe Flash and ActionScript. It was a magical era for indie developers.

  • Portal sites like Newgrounds, Kongregate, and Armor Games were booming.
  • A single developer could code a game in their bedroom, upload it, and see millions of people play it within days.
  • This blog thrived on sharing Flash tutorials, breaking down physics engines, and helping creators optimize their SWF files.

It was the wild west of casual gaming, and it was glorious.

2011 – 2015: The Great Transition & The Death of a Giant

Then came Steve Jobs’ famous “Thoughts on Flash” memo, followed by the rapid rise of smartphones. Almost overnight, the web gaming landscape fractured.

  • We had to learn HTML5 and JavaScript while they were still in their infancy.
  • Performance was sluggish, audio APIs were broken, and “mobile web gaming” felt like an uphill battle.
  • This was the era where we said goodbye to Flash and welcomed frameworks like Phaser, PixiJS, and CreateJS. It was a stressful but exciting time of reinvention.

2016 – 2020: Maturity, Hyper-Casual, and the IO Game Boom

By 2016, HTML5 had grown up. Web games were now running smoothly at 60 FPS on mobile browsers.

  • We witnessed the explosion of .io games (like Agar.io and Slither.io), proving that multiplayer web games could scale to millions of concurrent players using WebSockets.
  • Instant Games on platforms like Facebook redefined “hyper-casual” gaming.
  • On the blog, I shifted from basic prototypes to complex systems: procedural generation, complex physics, and cross-platform deployment.

2021 – 2026: WebGL, WebGPU, and Beyond

Today, the line between a “desktop game” and a “web game” is blurrier than ever.

  • With WebGL and the integration of WebGPU, we are rendering stunning 3D graphics directly in the browser without plugins.
  • Tools like Defold, Three.js, and even Unity exports have turned the browser into a high-performance console.
  • Web gaming is no longer just about “killing 5 minutes at work”; it’s a sophisticated ecosystem of cloud gaming, WASM-powered performance, and instant-play experiences.

A Sincere Thank You

Through every paradigm shift, API change, and dead language, you have been here.

To everyone who has read a tutorial, left a comment, pointed out a bug in my code, bought a book, or simply used one of my prototypes to build their own game: thank you. You are the reason this blog didn’t die out in year three or four. Your curiosity has kept my own curiosity alive for 7,305 days.

Here’s to the next chapter of the web. Let’s keep building.

— Emanuele