How The Impossible Quiz Runs Without Flash (and What Ruffle Changes)

Adobe stopped Flash Player in January 2021 and browsers removed it. The Impossible Quiz was made in Flash in 2007, so for a while the only ways to play it were an old browser or a downloaded projector. The copy on this site is neither: it is the original .swf file, hosted on theimpossiblequiz.co, played by Ruffle, a Flash emulator written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly so that it runs inside the browser like any other script.

What you will notice

• The loading screen. The quiz has its own 'Loading…' page with the dancing arrow, then a green BEGIN button. On a normal laptop that is a few seconds; on a low-end Chromebook with hardware acceleration switched off it can be twenty or thirty. It is not stuck — Ruffle is drawing the vector art on the CPU. Wait for BEGIN.
• No plugin prompt. There is nothing to allow or install. If the game frame stays blank, reload once; the WebAssembly module sometimes fails to get a graphics context on the first try.
• Right-click does nothing. The old Flash context menu is turned off. There was never anything useful in it for this game.

'This version of the quiz has no music'

The file here is Splapp-me-do's own quiet version, a lighter release of the quiz without the soundtrack so that it would load faster on 2007 connections. It is the same 110 questions with the same sound effects; only the background music is missing. We chose it because it is the copy that was already on this domain's old site and because it loads faster.

Saving

The quiz never saved progress in Flash either — there are no checkpoints by design. Ruffle keeps Flash 'shared objects' in your browser's local storage, but this game does not write one, so clearing your browsing data changes nothing. Every run is question 1 to question 110.

Mouse, touchpad, touch screen

The whole game is pointer-driven, and Ruffle passes mouse and touch events through, so it works on a touchpad and on a touch screen. The maze questions are the exception in practice: they end your run if the cursor touches a wall or leaves the play area, and a touchpad makes both easy to do. If you have a real mouse, plug it in for those.

Fullscreen

Use the fullscreen button under the player rather than the browser's zoom. Ruffle rescales the 550x400 stage to whatever size the frame is, and letterboxes the rest in the same dark purple as the game, so nothing is cut off at any size.

What is not here

The Impossible Quiz 2 and The Impossible Quizmas are not on this site. The HTML5 conversions we found were missing most of their question assets — they play to question five and stop — and we did not want to list a game that does that. If a complete copy turns up, it will be added.