Macromedia Shockwave Player

Shockwave Player is a browser plug-in for playing interactive multimedia content on the Internet that was created with Macromedia (later Adobe) Director. With its help you get access to web games, business presentations, product demos and entertainment content. It supported the most popular web browsers of its time, such as Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Netscape.

Director and Shockwave technology allow designers and developers to combine audio, video, text, vector and 3D graphics with scripted interactivity in a single file.

This made Shockwave popular for online games, advertising material, interactive marketing, distance learning, multimedia CD-ROMs and much more.

Shockwave Player lets web browsers play interactive games, presentations and 3D content created with Macromedia and Adobe Director.

At its peak, Shockwave Player was installed on more than 450 million computers all over the world, and it was widely used for interactive 3D graphics on the web, including movies created with Adobe Director. Adobe discontinued Director in February 2017 and retired Shockwave Player for Windows on April 9, 2019, after which it was no longer available for download.

Without this plug-in, sites built with Macromedia Shockwave technology do not display, and modern web browsers no longer run it at all.

Today the player is mainly used to open old Director content in legacy browsers such as Internet Explorer.