Over the past few months, I’ve been working with the folks over at Flashpoint to preserve web games. One of the questions I hear most often is: What is the difference between a Flash game and a Shockwave game? I’ve adapted the following article from a series of chat messages written by Anthony Kleine, known online as Tomysshadow. Thanks to him for providing this great explanation!
When asking the difference between Shockwave and Flash, you’ll often get the answer that they’re two products that have nothing to do with each other
That is almost true, but not entirely true.
Macromedia Director was originally designed to make software development easy, and it found its first home on the CD-ROM. However, in the 1990s, it began finding a new home on the web. “Shockwave” was Macromedia’s term which meant “compressed for the web.”
The first entry in the Shockwave line of products was Shockwave Director Player — so called because it could play Director Movies which had been compressed for the web. Because it was, at the time, the first and only product in the Shockwave line of products, Shockwave Director Player was often shortened to just “Shockwave.”
Enter Flash. Again, Macromedia wanted Flash Movies to be able to be compressed so they could be downloaded quickly over the web — so they made the Shockwave Flash Player plugin, so called because it could play Flash Movies which had been compressed for the web.
So there was Shockwave Director Player, to play compressed Director Movies, and Shockwave Flash Player, to play compressed Flash Movies. The problem is, by this point, everyone already knew Shockwave Director Player as just “Shockwave.” To those uninformed, it seemed that there was now both a Shockwave AND a Shockwave Flash. Shockwave Flash Player was more often referred to as just Flash, to avoid confusion with what was already being referred to as Shockwave.
So when we say Shockwave, we’re referring to the first word in Shockwave Director Player, but when we say Flash, we’re referring to the second word in Shockwave Flash Player.
This was the case until Adobe acquired these names from Macromedia, at which point they just decided to rename the plugins to what they were being popularly referred to as. Now what was Shockwave Director Player is just called Shockwave, and what was Shockwave Flash Player is just called Flash. In order to further undo the confusion, SWF was changed to stand for Small Web Format instead of ShockWave Flash.
There was actually a third Shockwave plugin — the little used Shockwave Authorware Player. As far as I’m aware it was mostly used in schools for educational software and never really found its way into gaming or the web at all. There was a web plugin for it as well.
