Homestar Runner

» go to homestarrunner.com now (it still works)

~ what it is ~

two brothers in atlanta, mike and matt chapman, put homestarrunner.com online on the first day of 2000. it is a flash cartoon site about a dopey armless athlete named Homestar Runner and his masked rival Strong Bad. the character started as a joke children's book mike made with a friend in 1996. the site version grew into hundreds of cartoons, fake video games, and one of the defining humor styles of the early 2000s web.

flash was everywhere in the internet cafe years here, but homestar humor is dense english wordplay and it never traveled to turkey the way flash games did. i knew it mostly secondhand, from trogdor showing up on every forum around 2003. the burninating dragon got further than the site ever did in this country.

~ the strong bad years ~

in august 2001 they started strong bad email, where Strong Bad answers real messages from viewers while sitting at an old computer. it became the main event. by 2003 the site was pulling millions of hits a month and close to a thousand emails a day, with zero advertising, no sponsor, no portal deal. the whole operation ran on t-shirt sales.

one 2003 email about how to draw a dragon produced trogdor, which escaped the site entirely and ended up in guitar hero. telltale made a licensed homestar game series in 2008. all of this came from two guys who turned down every ad network that ever approached them, which in the 2000s web was close to unheard of.

~ the quiet years ~

around 2010 the cartoons stopped. the brothers had families by then and t-shirts were not going to support two households, so they went off to write for actual television, gravity falls among other things. the site sat frozen for about four years and everyone assumed it was finished, another flash site waiting for the plug to be pulled.

then on april 1, 2014 a new cartoon appeared with no announcement. updates have continued ever since at a relaxed pace, holidays mostly, plus a youtube channel for the people who will not install anything. the site never explained the gap. it just resumed.

~ how it survived flash dying ~

adobe killed flash player at the end of 2020, and that was the real extinction event for this corner of the internet. thousands of flash sites went dark or lost their archives to broken plugins. the chapmans wired ruffle, the open source flash emulator, into the site, so every cartoon back to 2000 still plays in a modern browser at its original url.

no youtube rehosting, no remaster, no kickstarter for a rebuild. the site simply kept its own history runnable. very few flash-era sites managed this and most never tried. newgrounds and the internet archive did the same rescue for the wider flash world, but homestar did it for itself, quietly, before most people noticed flash was gone.

~ why it still matters ~

homestarrunner.com is what independent web publishing looked like before platforms. no ads, no algorithm, no login, characters that never got sold to a network. it survived its creators getting day jobs and it survived its entire technology being deprecated, because the people who own it care about it and keeping it alive costs them little.

the homepage tab still greets you with everybody, everybody, punctuation theirs. it is a small site now. honestly it always was. it just mattered far more than its size, and it still renders, which is more than you can say for almost anything else built in flash.

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »