What an extraordinary ending for an extraordinary piece of PC history: The departure of Adobe Flash Player in China suddenly led to that trains stopped all over Dalian City. Because they were controlled via the Flash Player – and someone simply missed the deadline.

But it gets even stranger. In order to iron out the mishap as quickly as possible, the technicians decided to switch to a pirated version of the Flash Player.

Adobe Flash ends and with it the train service

On December 31, support for Adobe Flash Player was discontinued after more than 20 years. Not really a surprising message, because the end of the program was announced in July 2017 and in this country we even received regular browser reminders. But the news apparently did not get through to the China Railway Shenyang in Dalian.

Flash users could continue to use the program undisturbed until January 12th, but a kind of “time bomb code” then blocked all content for the runtime environment. And so on January 12th in Dalian the reports that employees of the China Railway Shenyang could no longer access the digital train schedules

and there were outages all over the city.

The realization only came when technicians searched online for a solution to the problem. And in the rush, they decided on an unusual method: a pirated version of Adobe Flash Player that did not contain the time bomb code. But sometimes the strangest solution is the best and so train traffic was finally resumed on the night of January 13th.

Most of us are likely to have known Flash Player primarily through numerous browser games and video clips that have been brought to life in our browser for over 20 years. A piece of internet history ended on January 12, 2021.

But not only the Flash Player, also numerous games did not survive the year. In our video we tell you what they are and what led to their attitude:

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Discontinued Games 2020 – These games didn’t survive the year

Incidentally, in his extensive report, colleague Peter summarizes the game year 2020 in detail with its best games and biggest exciters.