So, July 2005, I'd only been working with Flash for about 5 years at this point, and professionally as a Flash developer for about 2 years. I had one very ambitious back burner personal project that I'd had to give up because it was too demanding for me, and too demanding for the limits of the Flash player at the time, so I had to think up something that wouldn't hit those limits.
So I decided to start building a game very similar to 'Speedball 2' by the Bitmap Brothers from just over a decade earlier.
The differences would essentially be that it would show the whole playing field, horizontally, as opposed to vertically and scrolling.
I'd also have it mouse controlled. This was before smartphones and tablets took off.
I actually did pretty well, except for my minimal scoping. The idea was to scope a game I could knock out in a week.
Anyway I gave up somewhere in the middle of coding the AI, which was a shame, as I would discover when I decided to start building it again the second time, I had almost written all the AI, just hadn't realised it at the time.
Now, thanks to the flash emulator ruffle I can show you how far I got:
https://www.johnc.pro/bugballswf/
You're the green team, hover over a player to control that player, then move around to move the player, click to shoot.
Click here for the 2018 update