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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
Sponsor of the best Flash games
Armor Games sponsored and hosted many of the highest-quality Flash games of the era, including tower-defence hits and puzzle games, with a brown-and-orange site and a loyal community of players and...
Nickelodeon's Flash arcade
Addicting Games, owned by Nickelodeon's parent Viacom, was one of the most-visited casual game sites in 2010, with categories like Shooting, Puzzle and Sports and a front page of ad-supported Flash...
Flash games with achievements, bought by GameStop
Kongregate hosted thousands of free browser games with badges, chat rooms beside every game and a levelling system for players. GameStop bought it in July 2010, betting that browser games were the...
Free games, and the school-computer favourite
Miniclip was where school computer labs went to play 8 Ball Pool, Club Penguin's ancestors and hundreds of other Flash games. In 2010 it claimed tens of millions of monthly players and was expanding...
Big in Latin America and Portugal
hi5 was one of the world's largest social networks in the mid-2000s, especially in Latin America, Portugal, Romania and Thailand. In 2010 it was pivoting toward social games and virtual gifts as...
Everything, by everyone: the Flash portal
Newgrounds was the original home of Flash games and animations, where amateur creators uploaded movies and games for the community to rate. In 2010 its Flash Portal still launched careers, and its...
The horror game that made YouTube scream
Frictional Games' Amnesia, released in September 2010, gave players no weapons, only a lantern and a sanity meter. Its terror made it the perfect subject for webcam reaction videos, and it fuelled...
One-minute matches and a weekly friends leaderboard
PopCap's Bejeweled Blitz turned the match-three classic into 60-second rounds with a leaderboard of your Facebook friends that reset every week. In 2010 it was one of the most-played games on...
The plugin that ran YouTube, FarmVille and every banner ad
Flash Player 10.1, released in June 2010, ran the YouTube player, Hulu, Pandora, FarmVille, every browser game and most animated adverts; Adobe said it was installed on about 99 percent of...
Always, I wanna be with you: the Flash game of 2010
Adult Swim's Robot Unicorn Attack, released in February 2010, was the Flash game of the year: a rainbow-trailing robot unicorn dashing through a pastel dreamscape to Erasure's Always. It was played...
The trick-question Flash game every classroom knew
Splapp-me-do's The Impossible Quiz, from 2007, was still one of the most-played Flash games on school computers in 2010: 110 trick questions, three lives, and skips. It was the kind of small, cruel,...
China's biggest social network, built on QQ
Tencent's Qzone, attached to the QQ messenger, was by most measures the largest social network in China in 2010, with hundreds of millions of active users decorating their spaces and playing social...
Disney's virtual world for kids
Club Penguin was the safe, moderated virtual world where children waddled around as penguins, played mini-games and decorated igloos. Disney had bought it in 2007, and in 2010 it was one of the...
Tower defence with peashooters, on every platform in 2010
PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies, released for PC in 2009, arrived on the iPhone in February 2010 (selling 300,000 copies in nine days), then the iPad, Xbox 360 and DS. Its lawn, its zombies and its...
Hexes, one unit per tile, and one more turn
Civilization V, released in September 2010, moved the strategy series to hexagonal tiles and one-unit-per-tile combat, and became a Steam fixture for the next decade. It was one of the year's big PC...
Rockstar's western, the game of the year for many
Red Dead Redemption, released on 18 May 2010, put Rockstar's open-world design in the dying American West. It won many game-of-the-year awards, its Undead Nightmare expansion in October became a cult...
The web ran on plugins, and every one of them wanted an update
In 2010 the browser was a host for plugins: Flash for video and games, Java for RuneScape and bank sites, Silverlight for Netflix, QuickTime and RealPlayer for media, Adobe Reader for PDFs. Each...
Text-based crime, energy bars and a lawsuit
Mafia Wars was Zynga's text-heavy crime game where you did jobs, recruited friends into your mafia and waited for energy to refill. It had millions of daily players on Facebook and MySpace in 2010...
Playfish's cute pets, bought by EA
Pet Society, from Playfish, let you dress up a pet, decorate its house and visit friends' pets, and was one of the largest Facebook games of 2010. Electronic Arts had bought Playfish for about $300...
Feed Om Nom: a million sales in ten days
ZeptoLab's Cut the Rope launched in October 2010 and sold a million copies in ten days, one of the fastest-selling iPhone games to that point. Its physics puzzles and green monster Om Nom were, with...
Steam comes to the Mac, and sales that emptied wallets
Valve's Steam store launched on the Mac in May 2010 with Portal free for two weeks, and its holiday sales, with daily deals at 75 percent off, became a ritual. Steam had around 30 million accounts...
Nintendo's best-reviewed game of the decade
Super Mario Galaxy 2, released in May 2010 for the Wii, added Yoshi and even more inventive gravity-bending levels to its predecessor's formula. It was one of the highest-rated games of the year and...
The torrent tracker that would not die
The Pirate Bay was the world's best-known BitTorrent index in 2010, a year after its founders were convicted in Sweden. Its pirate-ship logo, comment threads and "legal threats" page made it a symbol...
Black-and-white, silent, and the summer's indie darling
Playdead's Limbo launched on Xbox Live Arcade in July 2010 as part of Microsoft's Summer of Arcade. Its monochrome silhouettes, giant spider and puzzle-platforming won dozens of awards and helped...
Johto remade, with a Pokéwalker pedometer in the box
The DS remakes of Pokémon Gold and Silver reached North America and Europe in March 2010, bundled with the Pokéwalker pedometer. They sold more than 12 million copies and were the Pokémon games of...
The Wii party game that outsold the critics' favourites
Just Dance 2, released in October 2010, was one of the best-selling games of the year despite lukewarm reviews, proving the Wii's audience wanted to dance in the living room. Alongside Rock Band 3...
Name your price
Bandcamp gave independent artists a simple page to stream and sell their music, including "name your price" downloads in any format from MP3 to FLAC. By 2010 it was quietly becoming the fairest...
Nudges, winks and display names full of lyrics
Still called MSN by almost everyone, Windows Live Messenger was the dominant instant messenger outside the United States in 2010, with hundreds of millions of users. Its 2011 version, released in...
Pixel rooms and furni
Habbo Hotel, the Finnish virtual hotel of isometric pixel rooms, was where teenagers hung out and traded "furni" in 2010. Its Shockwave client, guest rooms and games were a cultural touchstone across...
What most of the world actually carried
Smartphones were still a minority in 2010: roughly one in five phones sold worldwide that year was a smartphone, according to Gartner. Most people carried feature phones, from Nokia candybars and...
From Something Awful screenshots to YouTube commentary
Let's Plays, playing a game while narrating it, began as screenshot threads on Something Awful and became a YouTube video genre by 2010, with Minecraft and horror games like Amnesia driving a boom...
A moderator's power to ban users, imagined as a hammer.
banhammer: A moderator's power to ban users, imagined as a hammer. Example: "the mods brought out the banhammer"
An iPhone 4 without the phone, and the teenager's first iOS device
The September 2010 iPod touch borrowed the iPhone 4's Retina display, A4 chip and FaceTime camera, starting at $229. For millions of teenagers it was the first App Store device, used over Wi-Fi for...
Tilt to jump, on graph paper
Doodle Jump, released in 2009 by two brothers, was among the most-downloaded paid iPhone games of 2010, with its hand-drawn Doodler bouncing up endless platforms using the phone's tilt sensor. It was...
An original one-button runner in the style of 2010 Flash games
Pixel Dash is this exhibit's own, original browser game, written for the time machine to show what playing a Flash game felt like in 2010: a fake preloader, a sponsor splash, a one-button runner and...
Monkeys, darts and the tower-defence craze
Ninja Kiwi's Bloons TD 4, released in late 2009, was one of the most-played Flash games of 2010 on Kongregate, Newgrounds and Ninja Kiwi's own site. Tower defence was the dominant Flash genre of the...
Obsidian's beloved, buggy Mojave
Fallout: New Vegas, released in October 2010, was Obsidian's cult follow-up to Fallout 3: deeper factions and choices, and famously unstable at launch. It sold millions and is still cited as one of...
The suicide mission
BioWare's Mass Effect 2, released on 26 January 2010, opened the year with one of its most acclaimed games: a squad-recruiting space opera whose final mission could kill your favourite characters...
Rockstar's western became one of the year's most acclaimed games and a frequent game-of-the-year pick.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
The social network at 500 million users
In 2010 Facebook was six years old, had just overtaken Google as the most-visited site in the United States on some weekly measures, and passed 500 million users in July. Its blue-and-white pages...
