Flash the thing to make websites and games.
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Early web pages were very static – they just sat there until the user tapped a link or button. In order to be interactive, you needed more than plain HTML, you needed a scripting language, graphics, sound, and an event model. Flash provided all of these.
Flash was cross-platform, running on both Windows and MacOS. It was pretty easy to write games using Macromedia/Adobe’s Flash app and the browser plugin was free. As others have pointed out, the original versions of Flash supported vector graphics and a very tight binary format that worked well even on slow dialup internet connections.
As for why it died, it got big, bloated, and had dozens and dozens of security issues that were never fixed. It used too much battery on smartphones. A more open language, JavaScript, replaced it for interactivity.
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