Newgrounds would give you Bloat or Dad ‘n’ Me . Kongregate gave you chat rooms and achievements. But Armor? Armor gave you polish .
Armor Games didn't just host games. It hosted dreams. And if you listen closely, you can still hear the midi synth of the Sonny battle theme echoing in the halls of every successful indie game on Steam today. armor games
Gemini Rue , Swords & Souls , Kingdom Rush ... these are Armor Games children that grew up to buy houses in the suburbs of Steam. We romanticize Armor Games because it represents a time when the barrier to entry was zero. You didn't need a dev kit. You didn need to pay $100 for a Unity license. You just needed a cracked copy of Flash MX and an idea. Newgrounds would give you Bloat or Dad ‘n’ Me
It created a meritocracy. If your game was good, it rose. If it was a broken mess full of stolen sprites, it sank into the graveyard of "3.0/5.0" purgatory. We all know what happened next. Steve Jobs wrote "Thoughts on Flash." HTML5 rose. The browsers stopped asking for permission to run plugins. By 2020, the death knell rang. Armor gave you polish