My favorite three aren't in there. All Dexter's Lab themed, now that I think about it.
One was puzzle game where you had to bounce a laser off of mirrors to pop balloons. The second was kind of a Chip's Challenge kind of deal I think, where you as Dexter were running away from an out of control robot, and had to collect some computer chips or something.
And in the third game, Dexter was running, inexplicably, a record store? Dunno if it was a tie in for a specific episode I don't remember now, but it's quite a funny premise, and a fun game too.
If you worked on any of these games, thank you! I spent so many hours back then on those, and many others.
I still had dial up back then, and I couldn't stay online for long. Eventually I figured out that if I kept the website open, then disconnected (rather than closing then disconnecting, which was what my parents taught me), the games would still work. Which is obvious to me now, of course, but as a 6~7 year old, who had no idea of how any of this worked, I felt like an actual, proper hacker. I literally just had the thought, "wait, what if..." and was promptly rewarded. I've been chasing that high ever since :)
From then on, my evening routine after school was connecting, picking the 3~4 games I wanted to play for that night, letting them load, disconnecting, and playing to my heart's content. If I hacked anything that fateful night, it was my parent's main excuse to get me off the computer!
The games you mention are Dexter's Laser Lab, Dexter's Labyrinth and Dexter MixMaster, by developers NetBabyWorld. Those games were originally their own game without the Cartoon Network branding. Labyrinth was based on Ninja Girl 1 and 2 and Dexter MixMaster was originally Tune Inn (that's why this one felt a bit off).
Since they were Shockwave based games they're not playable on modern browsers but they're playable with the Flashpoint Archive project. Huge timewaster, be careful. Better look for the games on YouTube :)
Hah, that explains the out-of-left-field theme! I had no idea they were reskins of exiting games. Interesting how child me managed to unknowingly zero in into the games of a single developer.!
And thanks for the game names as wel, although, I must admit that after posting that comment, I did go looking for them, and... Well, let's just say I've found my MixMaster skills to be quite rusty after all this time :p
I made this port, thanks for sharing it! The reason this game doesn't appear in the original list is because it was made in Shockwave, not Flash. I'm curious if there is any kind of emulator for Shockwave being worked on like what Ruffle is for Flash.
Thank you for being a part of my childhood then! I probably played (like everyone else my age) most if not all CN games. It's a shame they didn't do any sort of effort to preserve them officially.
RIP to TV networks and other media entities having free online computer games. Clone-a-doodle-doo and code of the samarai were my games.
ESPN also used to have great flash games. they had one where you'd skate on the roofs of houses and one where you had a BMX game that I think had a racing version and a freestyle version.
I learned a lot making these games while studying compsci. The platformer had a custom physics engine and I recall the pizza city open world was challenging to optimize for me at the time. Super fun to work on and appreciated the opportunity to work on these for PixelJam. These games were for comedy network and adult swim so in the same vein.
Thanks for whoever preserved these! The CartoonNetwork website was one of my most fondest memories from my childhood.
These days the official website redirects to their YouTube channel which I feel is very sad. There used to be places for kids on the internet, now everything is heading towards major platforms which I honestly feel is going to be damaging the youth in the long term.
Does anyone remember that Gorillaz flash game? You basically just had a dune buggy and drove around in a 3D world over some randomly scattered obstacles and terrain.
I remember being introduced to QBASIC as a kid, and at the time the use of extended ASCII characters for the graphics in Nibbles.bas was legit next-level to me.
Yes! I was just about to comment the same thing. I sank so many hours into that Dragon Ball Z game. Was called Dragon Ball Z Tournament. And its background music was an instrumental version of Sisqo's Thong Song. Wild.
some of these were actually pretty fun... i can't remember any of the names, but there were a few that were like pretty big adventure games that took like a couple hours to get through that i remember enjoying as a kid. and the best part? you could download the game and then run it offline so that you don't hog the family home phone line! :)
I played the CN flash games so much as a kid. Between that and Armor Games, Nitrome, Crazy Monkey Games, etc - I was spoiled for content. It does make me sad to see so much of it lost to time - though I also understand flash was bad and really did have to die.
Tried the Courage the Cowardly Dog game, after a nicely animated plane-landing, the game logic was broken and no enemies appeared. Never played the original, perhaps it had the same problem :)
Adult Swim Games was its own publisher and Robot Unicorn Attack was their breakout, but they kept shipping past Flash with stuff like Duck Game and Headlander. Worth its own exhibit, honestly.
I think part of it also is that, games with the same scope of flash games are still being made, but they're being made for phones which is where the customers. Flash games were the perfect mobile game before mobile games existed.
But the magic was that flash games were created on the same machines they were made on, so curious players (often kids!) had a natural funnel in to dabbling with the creation side, so whole communities of creatives formed naturally.
I don't know how we can solve this disconnect between creation and consumption :(
Sure there's many apps that let you build content from phones (swift playgrounds, other game-making apps, and now a whole gold rush of agentic prompting app-building apps...) but a phone is inherently non-immersive so I don't know how a creator can ever get into a flow state of building content on a phone itself.
But also we possibly just miss being teens on computers.
When I was eighteen, I went to Something Awful, Newgrounds, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, GameTrailers, Cinemassacre, YouTube, and SpoonyExperiment daily. Nowadays it's basically just YouTube for all that stuff (though I haven't watched Spoony for quite awhile).
Newgrounds is still around, I probably should make more of an effort to go there, and I do have stairs in my house, but I definitely don't go on as many different sites as I used to.
I certainly miss the days when everyone had their own web page.
Interesting approach. The key question for adoption is usually about the migration path — how painful is it for existing teams to switch, and what does the intermediate state look like?
One was puzzle game where you had to bounce a laser off of mirrors to pop balloons. The second was kind of a Chip's Challenge kind of deal I think, where you as Dexter were running away from an out of control robot, and had to collect some computer chips or something.
And in the third game, Dexter was running, inexplicably, a record store? Dunno if it was a tie in for a specific episode I don't remember now, but it's quite a funny premise, and a fun game too.
If you worked on any of these games, thank you! I spent so many hours back then on those, and many others.
I still had dial up back then, and I couldn't stay online for long. Eventually I figured out that if I kept the website open, then disconnected (rather than closing then disconnecting, which was what my parents taught me), the games would still work. Which is obvious to me now, of course, but as a 6~7 year old, who had no idea of how any of this worked, I felt like an actual, proper hacker. I literally just had the thought, "wait, what if..." and was promptly rewarded. I've been chasing that high ever since :)
From then on, my evening routine after school was connecting, picking the 3~4 games I wanted to play for that night, letting them load, disconnecting, and playing to my heart's content. If I hacked anything that fateful night, it was my parent's main excuse to get me off the computer!
Since they were Shockwave based games they're not playable on modern browsers but they're playable with the Flashpoint Archive project. Huge timewaster, be careful. Better look for the games on YouTube :)
And thanks for the game names as wel, although, I must admit that after posting that comment, I did go looking for them, and... Well, let's just say I've found my MixMaster skills to be quite rusty after all this time :p
[1] https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dexter%27s_Laboratory:_Sci...
Though that's an interesting point: some games were localized on the Brazilian CN website! Not all, but it's cool that at least some of them were.
You can play here: https://mattbruv.github.io/ccsr/
I don't know if it's nostalgia or what, but I still have fun playing it. Which can't be said for a lot of games.
ESPN also used to have great flash games. they had one where you'd skate on the roofs of houses and one where you had a BMX game that I think had a racing version and a freestyle version.
https://flashpointarchive.org/
Pizza City: https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/sear...
Cookie Party: https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/sear...
I learned a lot making these games while studying compsci. The platformer had a custom physics engine and I recall the pizza city open world was challenging to optimize for me at the time. Super fun to work on and appreciated the opportunity to work on these for PixelJam. These games were for comedy network and adult swim so in the same vein.
Can just grab them out of the cache once they've been downloaded, wherever they're stored.
You must have one somewhere, you're chatting on HN with a modern SSL certificate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwcQH5bF1LI
Looks like there's a wikipedia page about them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Lee_Media_productions
Oh wow, archive.org took a snapshot of my old website that put them online after the Stan Lee people went broke. :)
https://web.archive.org/web/20050313000913/http://www.stanle...
Right click -> "Enter fullscreen" works pretty well.
There's also a few on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_unsorted?t...
(In case the OP also made you think of Teen Titans Battle Blitz for the first time in 20 years)
These days the official website redirects to their YouTube channel which I feel is very sad. There used to be places for kids on the internet, now everything is heading towards major platforms which I honestly feel is going to be damaging the youth in the long term.
What about the short term? Even edgy angst flash movies like Sallad fingers on Newgrounds is pretty cutsie by modern big tech standards.
That was my entire computer class in 9th grade.
(that and harrassing teachers with netsend)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXR-bCF5dbM
I have unfortunately forgotten the gorillaz game though
Sadly, these two seem to be missing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdaf8ehjuX4
Someone already did it awhile back.
Gosh, what a nostalgia trip.
The summer resort games (iirc one big trade quest) were nice too.
https://old.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/yi02h2/who_remem...
It wasn't really a game in the TCG sense, but more of a collecting/bartering game similar to the Grand Exchange in Runescape.
There isn't much surviving media of it since people rarely recorded game footage back then, but someone made a website of it with some screenshots:
http://www.animeexpressway.com/rugrats/ecards.htm
(Sadly, it doesn't have any screenshots of the trading screen, which was the fun part)
they had a really good fighter jet game back in the day.
Good times.
Anyone remember what happened to Steppenwolf and the other games? I do not remember the publisher, I think WB?
I'd forgotten a bunch of those shows, like Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.
I hope they can restore the cartoon cartoon summer resort games.
Someone already did it awhile back.
Or possibly I just miss being a teenager. Or some combination
I think part of it also is that, games with the same scope of flash games are still being made, but they're being made for phones which is where the customers. Flash games were the perfect mobile game before mobile games existed.
But the magic was that flash games were created on the same machines they were made on, so curious players (often kids!) had a natural funnel in to dabbling with the creation side, so whole communities of creatives formed naturally.
I don't know how we can solve this disconnect between creation and consumption :( Sure there's many apps that let you build content from phones (swift playgrounds, other game-making apps, and now a whole gold rush of agentic prompting app-building apps...) but a phone is inherently non-immersive so I don't know how a creator can ever get into a flow state of building content on a phone itself.
But also we possibly just miss being teens on computers.
When I was eighteen, I went to Something Awful, Newgrounds, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, GameTrailers, Cinemassacre, YouTube, and SpoonyExperiment daily. Nowadays it's basically just YouTube for all that stuff (though I haven't watched Spoony for quite awhile).
Newgrounds is still around, I probably should make more of an effort to go there, and I do have stairs in my house, but I definitely don't go on as many different sites as I used to.
I certainly miss the days when everyone had their own web page.
It's fine if it's a bit sparse. Most people don't have a whole lot to publish on the internet.
Though it's more of a blog than anything else.
I might add some GeoCities web 1.0 junk to it at some point.
It was my first experience with what became known as Ambient Games...