From a 44 KB helicopter
to “over 5000 Games”

The September 20, 2002 capture is a white page of thumbnails and blue links. Under the wordmark run three links, Add to Favorites!, Tell A Friend and Submit Game, then a line of Recently added games: Snake3D, Fishin, Mini Putt 2, Space Invaders and Mouse Speed. The grid mixes Tetris and Air Hockey with stranger titles such as MS Paperclip and Spank the Monkey. Two empty cells say More games coming soon - Please bookmark!

The date is a lucky one. Twenty years later the company celebrated 20 years of free, fun, flash, casual gaming as of September 20th!, so this capture falls on the site’s own birthday.^[1]

The same post remembers a Comic Sans logo. It describes the beginnings as a simple portal site with a DIY attitude and Comic Sans logo.^[1] On this capture the wordmark is grey italic lettering with a shadow.

Bill Karamouzis, who bought the domain, told TheWrap that at first it was just a domain that linked out to other websites that had games. Hosting and game submissions were built later.^[2] At the bottom of the page a Friends list swaps links with 2DPlay.com, FunnyDoodle.com, Comik Zone and a Wholesale DVD shop, above a plain Copyright 2002.

By June 2003 the homepage has a voice. It opens with a dated note from whoever kept the list, written like a message to friends.

The new games come with one-line reviews: Defend your castle - Great game, fight off the invaders, and Five Finger Fillet - Practice here before trying it yourself. A yellow box on the right runs a Poll of the moment on the Favourite type of game?, with Action/Shooter, RPG, Puzzle & Strategy, Sports and Other.

Below it, a Top 20 Games row turns the old Top 5 into pictures, and the first picture’s alt text is helicopter. Six category lists now fill four long columns. Action alone runs from 6ixel to titles like Kill the Popups and Milk the Cow. The June 2004 capture keeps the white catalogue and its category columns and puts an advertising banner above the game list.

In 2005 Atom Entertainment bought AddictingGames,^[3] and the June 2005 capture looks like a company’s site. Blue-grey panels group featured games over long lists by category, and the wordmark is now white lettering on blue, still ending in .com. The welcome line has turned into a pitch: Welcome to Addicting Games, the largest source of great free online games including arcade games, action games, sports games, puzzle games, flash games and more. Updated every Friday!

Each featured game gets a one-line hook. Nabisco Bowling asks Can you Bowl a perfect 300 point game? and 501 Darts says Test your dart throwing skills without marking up the walls in your house.

One button looks backwards. Its alt text reads Click here to switch to the Classic Addicting Games. The page offered a way back to the classic version.

The June 2006 homepage drops the .com from the wordmark and keeps the blue-grey catalogue. Two months later MTV Networks agreed to buy all of Atom Entertainment, AddictingGames included.^[3]

The game at the top of the 2002 list had a page of its own. In December 2002 it is a title, the same favorites links and an eBay banner; in our replay the game box shows a photo of a snarling animal instead of the cave. By January 2006 the page credits the author, SeeThru.co.uk, and explains the game in one sentence: Last as long as you can flying through a cave without hitting the roof, floor or obstacles in your way. The instructions are shorter still, LEFT MOUSE BUTTON for helicopter power., and then comes the file’s weight: Size: 44 KB.

The June 2007 homepage has a lavender masthead and a busier welcome, Updated every weekday with lots of new games on Friday! Its new games include Stair Fall, pitched as Practice Falling Down Stairs! The footer says Copyright 1999-2007 Atom Entertainment, Inc., a date range that starts three years before AddictingGames did.

The June 2008 capture narrows the page onto a blue background. A black New Games panel leads, with bigger featured pictures and an advertising column on the right.

By June 2009 the site wants you to sign up. The header offers Join Now- IT'S FREE! next to a login link, and the page’s code holds a form to invite friends by email. The New Games box says Updated: 6/19/09, a banner for the AG Showdown asks you to VOTE for your favorite games!, and four of the new games carry the same label: Most Courageous Stick Figure Nominee.

The owner has changed in the small print. The 2009 footer reads Copyright 1999-2009 Atom Entertainment, Inc., a MTV Networks Company, and its links send you to Shockwave and Nick Jr.

The Helicopter Game page from January 2009 has a new description, four short sentences long: Helicopter go up. Helicopter go down. Helicopter go boom. Watch out for blocks.

Our June 2010 capture keeps the black New Games box above a tabbed Top Games panel whose list area is blank.

The June 2011 homepage stacks a tall New Games panel, featured titles and tabbed lists on the blue background. A thin bar across the very top, already there in 2010, names the family: addictinggames, nick, shockwave, teennick, nicktoons. In June 2012 a small orange nickelodeon logo sits at its right end.

The New Games heading is now handwritten in orange, updated 06/15/12, and the game blurbs are as silly as ever: Molies is Fling Worms for Mole Food, and I Saw Her Standing There asks My Girlfriend is a Zombie? Yikes! The top menu has a new tab, MOBILE.

The footer of 2012 names the business twice. A link reads Nickelodeon Casual Games, and the copyright belongs to Atom Entertainment, Inc., a subsidiary of Viacom International Inc. Next to the privacy policy sits a link for parents: What Do Our Warnings Mean?

The June 2013 capture is a different site. The blue is gone. The page is black, with chalk drawings in the margins, and the logo is red lettering under an orange nickelodeon wordmark. A yellow card in the corner says LATEST GAMES, then a dense grid of bright tiles.

Maisa Morin, who art-directed the redesign, describes it in her portfolio. The site had been Recently rebranded as Nickelodeon Addicting Games and needed a new logo and look, With only 9 weeks to complete this project. The team aimed for more than a reskin, but less than a complete overhaul of the site.^[4] The portfolio gives no date; our captures place the change between June 2012 and June 2013.

June 2014 keeps the black illustrated layout with a new mix of tiles. By June 2015 the orange nickelodeon wordmark has left the logo, and the mosaic promotes Frozen Islands.

In June 2016 the black page splits into rows with yellow and blue headings: MOST ADDICTING GAMES, GAMES ON THE GO!, NEW GAMES and SHOOT 'EM UPS. The on-the-go row is an ad for a phone game, The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, with App Store and Google Play buttons. The row sends visitors to phone games. The 2017 and 2018 captures keep the phone row, with other games in it.

Behind the screen this was a bad stretch. Karamouzis told TheWrap that the site ended up under Defy Media, where the content pipeline really stopped, and that the end of Flash Player made the decline steeper. He reached out to the owners after noticing the site was just going down into the gutter, and in 2018 he bought AddictingGames and Shockwave back.^[2]

The June 2018 capture already looks calmer: larger, evenly spaced tiles under MOST ADDICTING GAMES and fewer rows.

The June 2019 homepage is a new design: charcoal background, rounded tiles and colorful category chips that count their own games, Puzzle 1,459 games and Action 1,744 games among them. The first row of Most Addicting Games already includes io games like slither.io next to The Impossible Quiz.

Lower down, a row is labeled New Games - Every Thursday! The schedule was news that month. On June 10 the blog announced weekly updates again, every Wednesday at midnight, or Thursdays for you pedants, after years in which its Facebook page had sat dormant.^[5]

The copyright line has changed name too. Atom Entertainment and Viacom are gone from the footer, which now reads Copyright © 2019 Addicting Games, inc. Further down the same page, an article on the top ten Flash games remembers the era as a time with no micro-transactions, no pay walls, and no downloads.

The June 2020 homepage keeps the 2019 layout and adds a strip under the popular games: Want new games first?, with a button to upgrade to GAME PASS, a paid membership.

The Helicopter Game’s page, as archived in November 2019, shows how far the 44 KB file had come: Rating: 86% - 48,006,223 plays. It also gives a Release date: 13 Nov 2004, two years after the game led the 2002 Top 5. The description has learned to joke: Will you spend hours of your time racking up a high score only to see all of your hard work dashed in half the time by someone a quarter of your age? Yes absolutely. Such is the curse of helicopter game.

The bottom of that page explains how to make the game run at all: Click the Lock icon -> Site settings -> Flash and change Block (default) to Allow to play a game. In April 2020 the archive plays the Flash file itself, so the replay below shows the game’s own start screen.

On December 16, 2020, the blog said goodbye to Flash with a line that sits oddly next to that Lock-icon guide: Addicting Games hasn't been a Flash site for years.^[6]

The June 2021 homepage is all large colorful tiles: Mahjong 3D, Jewelish Blitz, Square Stacker, Candy Connect. Its footer still says Copyright © 2020 Addicting Games, Inc.

The old Flash games came back by another road. A June 11 blog post explained that they now ran through Ruffle, an emulator installed on the site itself, with about 30% of our catalog back online so far. It skipped the technical part on purpose: as far as the writers were concerned, a magician, possibly a relative of the install wizard, had cast a spell.^[7]

In September 2021 Enthusiast Gaming bought Addicting Games for about US$34.4 million, describing over 1,500 games to approximately ten million gamers monthly.^[8] The site’s own year-end post covers the deal with an editor’s placeholder still in it, at least in the version we read in October 2026.

The June 2022 capture keeps the category strip and two rows of popular games. That September the company turned 20 and introduced Apes.io, a new game from its own studio.^[1]

The captures we tried for 2023, 2024 and 2025 keep the layout but lose nearly all the game pictures, so we leave them out. In September 2025 Enthusiast Gaming announced a redesign with new features optimized for mobile play, and a refreshed homepage that highlights daily games and new releases.^[10]

We photographed the live homepage on October 16, 2026. A narrow rail of category icons runs down the left edge. Most Addicting Games is an uneven grid of big and small tiles, and an Indie Spotlight row below it promotes Nelly Jellies: Cozy Merge. The browser tab says Addicting Games has over 5000 Games, and the page’s own blurb promises games without interruptions, no downloads, intrusive ads, or pop-ups.

The Helicopter Game is still there. Its live page counts 14,327 ratings, lists the tags Classic Flash and HTML5, and gives the release date as Nov 14, 2004, one day later than in 2019. Its instructions still fit in six words: LEFT MOUSE BUTTON for helicopter power.

2002 · Top 520022026 · over 5000 Games2026

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In 2002 the homepage asked you to tell a friend and save them from boredom. There is no Tell A Friend link on the 2026 homepage. The helicopter from the top of that first list is still doing the job.