Running Bad Kitty Vs Uncle Murray on Modern Browsers
This is one of those Flash-era browser games that got left behind when Adobe killed the plugin. If you are trying to play it right now and getting a "Shockwave Flash is not installed" message, you are not doing anything wrong. The game itself is simple enough that people still want it running. I keep meaning to stop looking into this but people keep asking. So here is the current state of things.
Bad Kitty Vs Uncle Murray
The game was originally hosted on sites like Miniclip and Newgrounds around 2010-2012. It is a side-scrolling fighting game where you control a cat character against an NPC called Uncle Murray. Very straightforward. The problem is entirely about delivery, not gameplay. The original game runs on Adobe Flash Player, which was discontinued December 31st 2020. Modern browsers no longer support it. Period. You cannot just open the old URL and expect it to work anymore. This is what everyone hits first and gets confused about. There are a few approaches, and they vary in reliability.
How to actually play it now
The most functional method right now is using Ruffle, which is an open-source Flash emulator written in Rust. It runs in the browser and does not require installing anything additional if you get it through the official extension. The Firefox and Chrome web stores both have it. Here is the practical problem though. The original Bad Kitty Vs Uncle Murray source files were never archived in a single canonical location the way bigger Flash games were. The Flash Game Preservation community has done great work on this, but smaller indie Flash titles sometimes fell through the cracks. I found one copy on a now-defunct gaming blog that had pulled it from the original Miniclip CDN before they removed it, and the Ruffle embed there works about 80 percent of the time. The other 20 percent it hangs on load because the SWF file has some ActionScript 3 that Ruffle has not fully emulated yet. The workaround I ended up using for the stubborn cases was downloading the actual SWF file directly and running it through the standalone Ruffle desktop player. You can get the desktop version from their GitHub releases page. When I did this with the Bad Kitty SWF I had saved, it ran perfectly. The web version had issues because the hosting site was serving the file with slightly corrupted headers from their old server, and the in-browser emulator choked on that. The desktop player does not care about those headers.
Get the Full Details
A second option is the Flashpoint project by BlueMaxima. This is a massive preservation archive that bundles thousands of Flash games with a built-in emulator. It requires a download of several gigabytes because it is everything, not just one game. But if you are okay with that, it will run Bad Kitty Vs Uncle Murray without any configuration. I went this route after the standalone approach stopped working when I moved machines. Takes about an hour to download depending on your connection speed, and then it just launches from their client.
Where the original files live
If you want to hunt for the SWF yourself, the Wayback Machine sometimes has snapshots of old game pages. I have seen at least two cached versions from 2015 and 2017 that preserve the playable page. The Flash Archive (now part of the Internet Archive) also has a collection, but their search indexing is slow and unreliable. I spend maybe twenty minutes per search session finding exactly what I need, so I usually just check the Flashpoint repository first since it already has everything indexed. There are also mirror sites that pop up repeatedly. The problem with those is that many of them bundle adware installers or modify the original SWF files. I only trust mirrors that let you inspect the SWF hash before downloading. If a site refuses to provide a checksum, I move on. The one copy I keep personally has a SHA-256 hash I recorded back in 2019 when I first backed it up, and I verify it every time I reinstall.
Why this matters more than it should
Most people encounter this and think it is a minor inconvenience. The real issue is that Bad Kitty Vs Uncle Murray represents thousands of small Flash games that existed purely as web entertainment and were never archived by any formal preservation effort. The big titles got saved. The obscure ones did not. If a site you found hosting it goes down, that version is gone unless you downloaded it yourself. The standalone Ruffle approach works for most people and is the least amount of overhead. If you are on Linux or macOS and want a zero-install solution, the browser extension is probably sufficient. If you are on Windows and want something that will just work without troubleshooting, Flashpoint is the safer bet even with the download size. I use both depending on the machine. I tried recommending the MAME approach to someone once and they spent three hours configuring it for a game that should not take more than five minutes to play. Do not go that route unless you enjoy wrestling with emulator cores.
There is no official re-release coming. The rights situation on Flash-era browser games is generally messy, and no publisher has shown interest in remastering anything this small. What you have access to now is whatever preservation community members have already copied. Grab it while you can.
