What was the first Flash Game – Ep 6: Looking for Jonathan Gay

City Hunter (1999)

This post is part of an ongoing serie of posts about my researchs of the very first Flash game ever released. List of the previous episodes:

The first surprising area, early on […] someone built a pinball machine in Flash. It was a state machine where they had a bunch of frames and tell targets, and if you clicked the button at the right time, then it would go branch off that. This person was insane. […] Once I saw that, nothing surprised me.

This is a quote from Jonathan Gay from an interview he gave for the 2014 book FLASH: Building the Interactive Web. If you recall from the previous episodes, Jonathan Gay co-founded FutureWave Software, a software company that released in 1996 FutureSplash Animator, the software that would become Flash after its acquisition by Macromedia. The rest is history.

This quote is the most important part of the book for me. It shows the moment when Flash went from an animation tool for websites to a game engine. It might in fact be the missing link, the first thing made in Flash that can loosely be described as a game. The only thing left to do is to find it, assuming it has even been publicly released. And to know more about it, we have no choice but ask Jonathan Gay himself about that interview he gave ten years ago.

Now, how do I get in touch with him? I am not an investigative journalist, so I started quite simply with the Wikipedia page of Gay. It is not very long and hasn’t been updated since 2013, when he launched a Kickstarter for a mobile app called Explory. The fundraising was a success and the app launched on the App Store, but I believe it is no longer available now.

The Kickstarter page is not very interesting for our search but we have a company name: Exploratory Software Inc. With Google we can find a Linkedin page, where we can see it is a three people company founded in 2012. I highly doubt it is still active today, but the page is still up and gives us a link to a website. Defunct, of course but luckily there are archived versions on the WayBack Machine.

The website is about the app and not much else, there are little to no information about the team. There are links to a Twitter account and a Facebook account, both abandonned since 2014. For what it worth there is also a Google+ account. It seems like there was very few attempt at engaging with people on social media. Not a lot going on in here, but there is something interesting on Facebook: We can see the picture of someone named Robert Tatsumi, the co-founder of Explory. This name doesn’t ring a bell, but he was one of the two engineer that developed FutureSplash Animator. According to his Linkedin, he worked on Flash as a lead engineer until 2006. And since he co-founded Explory years later, it means he was still in touch with Jonathan Gay all theses years.

In general, Robert seems like a less public figure than Jonathan. While Jonathan has a Wikipedia page and did several interviews, Robert isn’t even mentioned in the book, despite being one of the two people that actually created FutureSplash. I don’t think it is a deliberate oversight, after all the book is about Flash as a cultural artifact, it is less interested in the technical details. And to be clear Jonathan never take all the credits for the creation of Flash, he mention his team numerous time. Still, it doesn’t help me tracking him. It is just a reminder that the people who actually made the most used softwares are rarely getting any appreciation.

And while I was on Facebook, it occured to me that I didn’t even tried to search Jonathan Gay directly. Feeling like an idiot, I typed the name, and here he was: A man named Jonathan Gay living in California, self described as the co-founder of Explory.

I tried to contact Robert, first via Twitter, then Facebook. Linkedin is out of the question since DMing cost money, somehow. I also sent a message to Jonathan on Facebook. It’s been more than a week now and I haven’t received any answer. It’s unlikely that I will receive one, but I am not very surprised. I’m not a journalist, just a random person sending a weird DM, they have no reason to respond. I’m still bummed out, though.

Today Jonathan Gay works in a ranch and seems quite happy in his life. I know from the book that he is aware of the impact he had on the Internet, and by reading his Wikipedia page, the man was went through all sorts of business ventures. I think it is better to leave him alone, and Robert too. I don’t want to harass them endlessly to ask about things that happened decades ago. So please, don’t send them messages on my behalf. Some day I might receive an answer, some day they could stumble upon this blog post. But for now, I think we can stop pursuing this lead.

Jonathan, of course, is not the only people to credit for Flash. Robert was the main engineer, and so was another unnamed member of the team. They all played a part in the creation of this tool that revolutionized the web. They witnessed the explosion of creativity they directly caused, and at some point, they tried what could be described as the first Flash game. As for my research, I can only imagine what it could have been. I am not especially skilled to do research, interview people and all that. I am just obsessed with Flash games, and I wanted so bad to find the very first one. But now I think I will never find it.

See you next time for a conclusion.