Long ago the 3 Books on Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender website provided a comprehensive guide to the world of Avatar, but everything changed when the site was shut down…

As can be seen above, ATLA used to have an interactive encyclopedia of its own in the form of a massive Flash page. Fans of the show could see Aang and his crew’s travels on the world map, with every point representing the location of a particular episode. You could read up on the events, the geography and the history of the world!

But as the years went by, the contents of this compendium have fallen into obscurity. Besides a few screenshots on Avatar Wikia, a less-interactive fanmade archive of the website is still available. The Lost Lore of Avatar Aang is a Tumblr blog contains the entirety of the text entries, and a very good portion of the images from the original website.

With the death of Flash Player upon us, archivists have initiated a hunt to find (or rebuild) a working version of the interactive Flash version of the website.

-Why did we name it Avatar “yield”?

-Well we were trying to muster up an army to force nick to reupload the game!

Actual Conversation on the AYP Discord Server

The team have been collecting and piecing together WayBackMachine snapshots, tracking down mirrors of minigames and are hoping to contact the series creators who were involved in the making of the Avatar website.

They still have a lot to do, before they save anyone. But I believe the Avatar Yield Project can save the World!

If Avatar the Last Airbender meant something to you, or if you’re only a lost media connoisseur, join the team! Click here to join the Avatar Yield Discord Server.

Be sure to also check out the Welcome to Republic City Tumblr archive, which is more or less the Legend of Korra equivalent. (Interactive version mirrored here, also available on Flashpoint)

Imagine never being able to play the one game you enjoyed so much as a kid. The thought of a beloved game being lost would scare most gamers: Mario Kart gone without a trace, Sonic and Knuckles thought to be a fever dream. However impossible this may seem, for many this has become a scary reality. In the world of web games, the internet is an ever-changing place. A game can be played one minute and gone the next, leaving only mere mentions of it from a few people, stranded in an ancient forum, hosted on a potato.

Because web games can be lost so easily, there are a lot of people searching for their web game white whale. Enter the Hunters of Flashpoint. We aim to find what others consider lost: from Postopia breakfast bonanzas to games that are generally considered to carry curses. Hunters find the weirdest nonsense you thought was a fever dream. See, web games are fairly unique, in the sense that they can easily be put on multiple sites with little to no effort. As a result, many web games were hosted on thousands of different sites, plenty of which are carbon copies of each other. Such an effect is a double-edged sword. Flash developers have had their works stolen time and time again, which is bad for business. However, when that original site goes down because the creator decided that it just didn’t live up to their expectations, the game runs the risk of being lost to time. Luckily, some Iranian fellow has your back seeing as he stole the game 3 days after it went up.

With the nature of our work, some of the games we have found have some interesting stories behind them. One Hunter who goes by the online username of ‘Steviewonder’ curated the 28 Weeks Later movie tie-in game, not realizing we thought it lost. Another of Stevie’s stories happened during a time he was scouring open Dropbox accounts, where he found a lost game hidden in the files of a random person from another country. A version of the King.com Luxor game was found on a Chinese site, miraculously working with all assets. I myself am a fairly new face to the project, but even I have my stories. I was able to find South Park: Big Wheel Death Rally (screenshot in the thumbnail) on a site called joflash.hu, which is a Hungarian site that for some strange (but lucky!) reason was not using the broken embed every other site had used. The owner of joflash.hu had instead taken the .DCR and all its assets and ported them to their site, bypassing the problem everyone else who stole the game had when the embed died. Much more recently though for me was a game by the name of Pebbles Popstar, one of the lost Postopia games. This game turned up on a site that I won’t directly mention due to the fact it hosts copyrighted material. (I will say though it’s a Polish filesharing site themed around hamsters, which should be all the info you need.)

However, odd locations on the internet isn’t the only place lost games have turned up. Computerdude77 asked an unusual question to the Flashpoint staff one day: could games be extracted from an old Internet Explorer web-cache? Turns out, after some effort, yes, yes we could. Hearing this information, Computerdude77 took it upon himself to search through the web cache of his grandmother’s computer in hopes of finding some games he played as a kid. Boy, did we get lucky. Many a lost game was found, and a few games that were already in Flashpoint but incomplete were finished thanks to Computerdude77’s work.

Not all hunting goes smoothly though, and there have been more than a few blunders. One time I spent 3 days working on tracking down a game from the Flashpoint Lost Games list. Everywhere I looked for this game it was missing some assets or it hadn’t been copied properly. After 3 days I finally found a copy of it. I was so excited. I posted my findings in the Hunter Lounge, only to be told that the game had been found months ago and curated with a different name. Nobody had marked in on the sheet as found, so I had spent days looking for a game that was already rescued. But hey, those things happen when volunteering one’s own time to save history. These examples are why we need more folks to come together to help save the web games of our collective childhoods. Adobe ends support for Flash in 2020, and when that happens so much more will be lost. It is a race against time, and we need everyone.

If you would like to find out more about this strange and fantastic project, just check out the community spotlight for more info, or if you’re already sold head on over to the website or Discord Server!