project review: NuMuKi
What the heck is a NuMuKi???
NuMuKi is a digital archive of browser games made primarily using Adobe Flash and HMTL5. Games made in the 90s and 2000s have the former, and the latter supports NuMuKi's modern installments. As of October 27th, 2023, when the archive was last updated, NuMuKi boasts 3,910 games in 176 categories in their library.
Who is NuMuki for?
The core audience for this project is Gen Z girls and, to an extent, Zillenials (between millennials and Gen Z). Their most played games consist of Barbie, Bratz, and Hello Kitty, which all have seen revivals in popularity. NuMuKi is heavily and most effectively marketed on TikTok. When you search "numuki," you'll find users talking about how the library is reviving their childhood alongside dreamy, nostalgic audios. TikTok users promote NuMuKi as an escape as refreshing as a glass of cold water at 3 a.m. when you're dying of thirst in bed. To expand its audience and perhaps shy away from its girly image, the NuMuKi team recently added the Papa Louie franchise and other games by its creator, Flipline Studios. These games were once free to play online but are now exclusively on mobile apps you must pay for. NuMuKi as a whole is also free of charge.
How does it work?
NuMuKi is hosted as a website and can be downloaded as an app. I’m going by the app because I use it most frequently. The archive contains two sections: one specifically for Disney games (on browser as disney—games.com) and one for other companies like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. When you click on a game, you may have to sit through an unskippable ad. There are also ads you can either drop down or remove by using fullscreen. When you scroll down, you can (dislike) what you just played, see when the game was added to the archive, and view the categories they are under. Each game has a rather lengthy description provided by the NuMuKi team. I find this hilarious, considering some of these games take a maximum of two minutes to complete. You can interchange between NuMuKi and Disney—Games by right-clicking.
Behind-the-Scenes Stuff
The NuMuKi team comprises a few (maybe a dozen) people who work hard enough to expand their catalog on a reasonably frequent basis. According to their now-defunct blog, NuMuKi existed since October 2014 at the earliest. More popular competitors, such as Gogirlgames.com, overshadowed NuMuKi. However, NuMuKi received substantial traffic after Adobe discontinued Flash in December 2020 because its website was mainly unaffected by Flash's shutdown. As mentioned earlier, NuMuki seemed to appear out of the blue one day. Unlike its predecessors, NuMuKi (or rather, its consumers) latched onto the rise of 2000s nostalgia starting in the early 2020s. NuMuKi exceeds into abandonware and lost media since the games they are reviving are otherwise now inaccessible. has contributed to a niche yet profitable community of young people being thrown into the throes of adulthood and longing for simpler times.
Ideas for Improvement + General Thoughts
I would like the NuMuKi team to be more accessible. The team can only be contacted through business inquiries. I was going to try and ask them some questions for this review but decided against it since I didn’t find my situation dire enough. They are inactive on social media; they only use Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit (they haven’t used the latter in over a year). Regarding advertising, it seems unaffiliated TikTok users do the heavy lifting. None of the TikTok ads are paid partnerships, so players are spreading the word through genuine appreciation for NuMuKi. As for the app, I’d like to get rid of the extra ads on the sides of the screen and would settle for the unskippable ad. Ad blockers work fine on the website, but I prefer to use the app for convenience since NuMuki and Disney—Games are technically two different websites, and I don’t want to click back and forth all the time.
Bibliography
https://www.disney--games.com/
https://www.facebook.com/NuMuKi/
https://www.reddit.com/user/NuMuKi/
https://www.numuki.com/
https://www.numuki.com/blog/sofia-the-first-meets-princess-hildegard/
https://twitter.com/numuki