Games
Flash to HTML5 Modernisation: Great Fire of London Case Study
Rescuing a Legacy Flash Experience
Legacy ModernisationReverse EngineeringHTML5Educational
Client
Museum of London
Context
Previous Tenure
Role
Lead Engineering
Tech Stack
HTML5, TypeScript, Phaser
The Great Fire of London interactive game was a staple in UK classrooms, but it faced a critical threat: Digital Obsolescence. Built originally in Adobe Flash, the game was slated to become unplayable as browsers dropped Flash support.
This was a “Rescue Mission” spearheaded by Ocean View Games’ current Lead Developer during their tenure at a previous agency. The goal was to reconstruct the game for the modern web. The catch? The original source code was lost.
The client needed the game preserved, but without the source code, a simple “port” was impossible. We treated the original game as a “Black Box,” reverse-engineering the logic frame-by-frame to produce a 1:1 recreation in modern HTML5/TypeScript.
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Get in TouchOur Contributions
🔍
Reverse Engineering Mechanics
Catalogued every interaction, animation timing, and win-state condition from the Flash version, then wrote modern TypeScript to replicate these behaviours exactly.
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UI/UX Modernisation
Re-engineered the layout from 4:3 CRT to responsive 16:9, decoupling UI from the game world so menus anchor to screen edges on any device.
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Asset Optimisation
Extracted original vector assets into optimised sprite sheets, reducing download size and draw calls for fast loading on slow school Wi-Fi.
The Tech Stack
