GROW IS BACK

July 17, 2024 1:58 PM

Now on Youtube, there is GROW Kingdom! Watch each short animation, then click to determine what to do next. See if you can predict what your actions will do. I bet you won't guess correctly! It's still fun, absurd, amazing, charming and wonderful. If you don't remember GROW, as it's been a few years, see inside....

Once upon a time on the internet there was Adobe Flash, which ushered in an era of light and fun games on the internet. And then Adobe killed it. Although you can still play Flash kind of using Ruffle.

One of the things that Flash made possible is Eyezmaze's wonderful GROW series, which used to be common sights here. On, the maker of Eyezmaze, had some health issues, and a kid, but is still around.

Previous Eyezmaze things that are still playable (Ruffle may be required for some):
• The original GROW (a.k.a. GROW Planet, 2002)
• GROW 2 (2006)
• GROW SunBoy (2007)
• GROW Tower (2009)
• TRANSFORM (2009)
• GROW Cannon (2011)
• GROW Figure (2011)
• GROW Maze (2013)
• GROW Recovery (2015)
• GROW Cube (2016)
• GROW Comeback (2018)

Several GROW games were made for mobile platforms, but because Apple and Google care nearly as little for software preservation as Adobe does they're unplayable now. Someday they'll be on history's trash heap too, and I hope the GROW games outlive them all!

posted by JHarris (14 comments total)

I remember the original from back in the day, but there are a lot more iterations than I knew about! Thanks!
posted by rikschell at 2:14 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]

There's a puzzle in my escape room that's inspired by these, and very occasionally players recognize that! Ours is a lot simpler though, with only 5 options to choose their order, because we didn't have time to write all the clever interactions, and our players wouldn't have time to explore them.

I don't love youtube as a format for this - the game seems totally doable with modern web technologies, and youtube navigation lets you cheat by skipping and undoing with the back button. While maybe that's actually a QoL improvement, I am an Eyemaze GROW purist!
posted by aubilenon at 2:33 PM on July 17 [3 favorites]

Grow Cube is a highlight if you want to lose an afternoon to just one
posted by macrael at 2:33 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]

Oh boy. When Flash died, my two greatest losses were Neutral's room escape games and GROW. I'm glad folks are still out here, in the darkest of times, making fun little things for us.
posted by phunniemee at 2:34 PM on July 17 [9 favorites]

MetaFilter: There's a puzzle in my escape room that's inspired by these
posted by doctornemo at 2:49 PM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Ah, the link to TRANSFORM doesn't seem to work. I'm not sure if it changed since I posted it or if I got the URL wrong. I'll try to get the right address later.
posted by JHarris at 3:10 PM on July 17

Ah, TRANSFORM is working on this machine. Never mind I guess.
posted by JHarris at 4:28 PM on July 17

Who/what is the the little purple/blue Beings and why does every iteration of the game force me to hurt them ?
posted by Faintdreams at 3:16 AM on July 18

RIP Flash. While it had security issues, it was by far the best and most accessible platform for creating interactive web experiences that has ever existed. I remember going to the Flash Forward conference in 2000 where my colleagues were talking about using ActionScript to create data-driven Flash apps via what were essentially AJAX calls on the backend. It was truly cutting edge at the time. Those were heady times!
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:17 AM on July 18 [1 favorite]

All the various GROW entries, along with lots of other Flash games, can be played locally via Flashpoint.
posted by hanov3r at 11:04 AM on July 18

I had considered saying more about playing them in Flashpoint, but then I tried loading them in my local Flashpoint install and couldn't get them to run. I eventually got them working by just deleting my Flashpoint directory and reinstalling. Grow RPG is a highlight!
posted by JHarris at 3:08 PM on July 18

So I looked through Flashpoint some more, and found one of On's early puzzles Chronon. I remember it had a MeFi post about it. It did: I made it! It's really tricky.
posted by JHarris at 1:37 AM on July 19

I don't remember playing this back in the day but I just went through the original and it's fun! I like this kind of logic puzzle, although it took me pen and paper to solve it because my memory is trash these days.
posted by restless_nomad at 5:45 AM on July 20

If you're referring to Chronon, yeah it's one of On's most difficult puzzles. The best thing about it is you can keep going after the "dwarf" escapes, and even make the ogre happy at the end too. Doing so is necessary to get the maximum score. On thought it was a failure, and I can see why a bit, but once you understand the rules to how the time changing works it's a good puzzle, although it takes a lot of playing around to figure out everything you can do.

The demise of Flash as a platform is an example of how ill-served we are by corporations being in control of basically any part of the internet. They're always going to mess it up eventually. Ultimately what doomed Flash was Apple's unwillingness to host other platforms on their own hardware. It was a time when everyone thought that mobile platforms were the future, to the extent that desktops were naturally doomed. While mobile is still big, it didn't quite work out like that, we still needed desktop machines to do work on, and there are often times when you need a bigger screen and a physical keyboard.

As a result, we now have a whole generation of web developer with a toolbox of nearly useless skills. How many of those people were able to transition that knowledge to other platforms? Adobe has much to answer for, oh yes, but that might have been their greatest crime, just abandoning the space and destroying a whole internet subculture, of games and animation creation, that's never really recovered.
posted by JHarris at 8:05 AM on July 20