Public information · Form BRG-7

About the Bureau

Between roughly 1998 and 2012, an enormous share of human idleness was absorbed by small games that ran on Adobe Flash. When Flash was retired at the end of 2020, tens of thousands of those games stopped working overnight. Most were never ported anywhere. They simply went dark.

The Bureau of Recovered Games exists to reverse a small part of that loss. We locate Flash games preserved by the Internet Archive, catalogue them, and serve them playable in your browser through Ruffle, an open-source Flash Player emulator written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly. Everything runs on your own machine. Nothing is installed, and no plugin is required.

The paperwork, explained

The Bureau speaks in intake forms and file numbers because boredom deserves a little ceremony. Behind the stamps, the mechanics are honest ones:

• The “I’m Bored” button prescribes a game on the spot, tuned to your tastes when we know them and to the public record when we don’t.
• Form B-12 (Prescriptions) matches a game to your mood and the time you actually have.
• Your File (records division) shows everything the Bureau knows about you — one cookie of tastes, kept on your device, never tied to a name. You may destroy it at any time.

Support

The Bureau is funded by clearly-marked paid notices placed around, and never inside, the games. If a notice ever interferes with play, that is a defect; report it.

Questions, corrections, or claims regarding specific files: see Legal & Takedowns.