The game explores themes and settings related to 1990s and early 2000s Internet culture (its name being a parody of Macromedia Flash), especially the loss of digital history through deprecations and data decay.
Some of the game is directly implemented on a website's open .htaccess directories, while other portions of it take the user through other previous art projects by Lawhead, such as an application titled Electric Zine Maker.
Lawhead mentioned wanting to have some sort of fictional context for Electric Zine Maker, and created Mackerelmedia Fish as a tie-in to that project as well as future ones.
[1] They also mentioned wanting to create an interactive project that made use of open directories for a long time.
[3] Writing for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Lauren Morton praised the game for its 'clever oddity', calling it a "portal back to my childhood when the internet was, if not weirder than now, differently weird".