Whenever Halloween season rolls around, my mind cannot help but wander back, at least once or twice, to the hey day of the old internet. Those of you who were around in the early- to mid-2000s might remember it, a wild world of cheaply made websites and hundreds, if not thousands of flash games made for any and all reasons under the sun. Since we still didn’t know how much the internet would integrate into our daily lives, this was the period when everyone was just trying whatever they could to see what worked. And for us kids, that meant games!

I don’t really remember many of the probably hundreds of flash games that I played as a kid, but I DO remember that Halloween was, for whatever reason, an absolute gold mine for flash games! And, of course, they were all spooky. I think my all time favorite is the one shown above: “Trick or Treat Beat!”, which actually had at least three different versions made of it before Apple killed flash back in the mid-2010’s. I’m not sure why I loved it so much, but maybe it had to do with the costumes actually having powers and getting to interact with some of my favorite cartoon characters.

You can still find the original here, if you’d like to try it out for yourself. I downloaded it and it seemed to work fine.

There was also the “An Escape Series” Games made and hosted by AfroNinja.com (IT’S STILL THERE! WOW!) I guess these were never really spooky outright, but I still found them a bit unsettling when I was younger. You know, you’re locked in a room, it’s set up like a tamer version of a SAW trap, and there’s a timer constantly ticking down. I dunno, I guess that was enough to freak me out when I was younger. Nowadays it takes something like Outlast or Silent Hill 2 to do that. Hmm…maybe desensitization is a real thing after all, eh?

The last spooky flash game that made a permanent mark on my brain was the one pictured above. It was just a stupid little promotional game made for the release of the then brand new Mountain Dew Pitch Black flavor (holy cow do I feel old all of a sudden!).

The game was called “Terror in the Woods,” and it consisted of nothing more than mashing the right and left arrow keys as something chased you through the woods and into the Pitch Black Haunted House pictured above. You never get to see the monster, but I always imagined it to be a bottle of Pitch Black with fang or something. I dunno, it just seemed like it would be on brand for something like this.

I actually tracked this one down too, but I can’t seem to get access to the .swf file that the game lives in. If you try it and have any success, let me know! You can see it here.

That’s all I’ve got for now, but stay tuned for more Spooktober from all of us here on Virtual Bastion! We’re kind of doing a grab bag this year, so even I don’t know what’s next! For now though, why not share some of your favorite flash games below? They need not be of the spooky variety, anything would be cool!

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Lede image is a screengrab from YouTube.