The History of Free Games

The Early Days of the Web
If we want to trace free games on the web all the way back to their roots, we have the role playing games that people used to play on message boards well before there was any such thing as online action or puzzle games, or web browsers for that matter. These games were played much like a tabletop RPG with a dungeon master and various players who would play characters.

Early Browser Games
Once the internet as we know it today came to be, various programming languages were developed to program the websites themselves. HTML, Java and so on. It wasn't long before people realized that these languages could also be used to program games. When Flash was introduced, a whole new level of complexity became possible.

Current Popularity
The popularity of free browser games today owes itself to a number of factors. For one, there are easy game making programs that anyone can pick up and use whether or not they know anything about programming. Secondly, as high speed internet becomes more and more a household staple, more and more people are able to play the online browser games out there, and make their own.

In the future, we may well see these browser games rivaling console games for sheer depth of graphical quality and polish, until then, they serve as the pop songs of the gaming world: catchy, addictive, and fun.