Newgrounds

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

~ what it was ~

newgrounds was where i went after school in 2002 to play stick figure cartoon games and watch animation parodies. i was eighteen, at university in turkey, and the school computer lab had decent broadband but a strict deadline at 5pm. i would spend my last hour playing flash games on newgrounds. xiao xiao stick fight series. that one alien blob platformer. dad n me. salad fingers when it shocked everyone in 2004.

the site started in 1995 as tom fulp's personal homepage. it shifted to user-submitted flash content around 1999. by 2003 it was the place where flash creators uploaded their work, voted on each other's submissions, and the best stuff went viral. an entire generation of animators and game designers got their start there. egoraptor (now a successful youtube animator) started on newgrounds. johnny utah (lead designer at supergiant games) started on newgrounds. the alan becker stick figure animator who became a youtube giant in the late 2010s started on newgrounds.

~ the flash years (1995 to 2010) ~

adobe flash was the engine of an entire creative economy from about 1999 to 2010. you could make a small interactive animation in flash, export it as a swf file, and any browser anywhere could play it. no installation, no app store, no platform tax. newgrounds was the most important hub for that economy. miniclip was bigger commercially but newgrounds was where the actual creative work lived.

the site had its own culture. portal review system where users voted submissions to "the front page" or "blammed" them off. madness combat (an animated stick figure series). the ear-rape genre of audio submissions. the entire pico character universe (tom fulp's own creation). pico day every april 30th, when fans submitted tributes. it was a real internet community in the 2003 sense, with regulars and rivalries and inside jokes that took weeks to learn.

~ how it survived flash dying ~

adobe announced in 2017 that flash would be killed off by the end of 2020. browsers stopped supporting it through 2020 and 2021. by january 2021 you could not play a flash file in any major browser. the entire newgrounds archive of tens of thousands of games and animations was at risk of becoming unplayable.

the newgrounds team did something nobody else really did. they integrated ruffle, an open-source flash emulator written in rust by mike welsh. ruffle plays most flash content directly in the browser using webassembly, no plugin needed. newgrounds deployed it across the site so old submissions kept working. the rollout took about two years. some games still do not work perfectly because they used obscure flash features that ruffle has not implemented yet. but most of the archive plays.

this is real preservation work. nobody made the newgrounds team do this. there was no business case strong enough to justify the engineering hours. they did it because they cared about not losing the archive. that is rare.

~ what is still there ~

go to newgrounds.com today. the front page has new submissions from this week, mostly indie animations and small games made in HTML5 now instead of flash. but the archive button works. you can browse submissions from 2002, click on any of them, and most of them still play.

the cultural relevance is much smaller than 2005. tiktok and youtube ate the casual creator audience. itch.io ate the indie game distribution. but newgrounds is still here, still posting, and still maintaining the older content. for people who came up on flash games, newgrounds is the museum that the rest of the internet should have been.

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