Miniclip
The browser-games portal you loaded the second the teacher turned around — a wall of free Flash games for every spare ten minutes, from stick-figure violence to pool. If one game got blocked at school, Miniclip was where you found ten more.
Miniclip launched on March 30, 2001, founded by Robert Small and Tihan Presbie on a £40,000 budget, and headquartered today in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. It was a portal — a huge, browsable catalog of free browser games — and it became one of the definitive time-killers of the Flash era, hosting hundreds of titles you could play without installing a thing.
The catalog was enormous; by July 2009 the site hosted over 400 applications, and the company had been valued at more than £275 million as early as 2008. It later developed 8 Ball Pool in-house and published other breakout mobile hits like Agar.io and Plague Inc., pivoting hard to mobile and passing a billion downloads by December 2016 and four billion by March 2022.
Tencent acquired a majority stake in February 2015, and in July 2022 Miniclip finally shut down its browser-game portal, leaving only a couple of survivors like Agar.io and 8 Ball Pool on the site. The wall of Flash games is gone, but for anyone who grew up sneaking onto it in a computer lab, "miniclip.com" still reads like a password to a wasted afternoon.
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