Newgrounds

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 1995 · Newgrounds.com, run by Tom Fulp from the Philadelphia area, USA · Also known as NG; New Ground Remix; Newgrounds.com

What it is

A website where anyone could upload their own cartoons and small games, mostly made with Flash, a piece of software that let web browsers play animation and simple games. Other visitors watched or played them, gave star ratings and wrote reviews. A new upload with low scores was deleted, which the site called being "blammed". It also hosted music and drawings. The site still runs, though Flash itself was switched off at the end of 2020.

Where it came from

Tom Fulp started it in 1995 as New Ground Remix, named after a fanzine he'd made as a teenager, and posted his own crude games on it. In 1999 he released Pico's School, a Flash game far more polished than most amateur work at the time, and the site took off. That year he opened "The Portal", where strangers sent in their own Flash work. By 2000 the uploads were automated so anyone could post. It reportedly had over two million users by 2010.

How people used it

People, often teenagers working alone at home, made short cartoons or games and uploaded them. The first hours mattered: visitors rated each one from zero to five stars, and an average that fell too low got it blammed, leaving only the reviews behind in a section called the Obituaries. Survivors could reach the front page. Reviews were blunt, and the audience cared more about jokes and story than clean drawing. Animators organised group projects called collabs on the forums, and fans held yearly days where everyone made tributes to a favourite series.

Why it mattered

Before YouTube, there was almost nowhere for an amateur to show a cartoon or game to thousands of strangers. Newgrounds was that place, and a lot of later careers started there: Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin's Alien Hominid became a console game, Meat Boy led to Super Meat Boy, and Friday Night Funkin' launched there in 2020 with Pico in the cast. When Flash died, the site paid towards Ruffle, a program that plays old Flash files, so much of the back catalogue still works.

The jokes around it

• Blammed: deleted by vote, the worst thing that could happen to a new upload.
• Madness Combat: Krinkels' violent stick-figure series, celebrated every year on Madness Day with fan-made tributes.
• Clock Crew: a group who made deliberately terrible cartoons with clock characters, and fought a rival gang called the Lock Legion.
• Pico: the red-haired boy from Pico's School who became the site's mascot and later turned up in Friday Night Funkin'.
• "Everything, By Everyone": the site's slogan.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People will make things for nothing if strangers might see them. Newgrounds also shows that a harsh crowd vote on every upload didn't scare amateurs off: they treated surviving the blam as a badge and kept posting.

What noah is not sure of

The specimen says Madness Combat began in 2001; many sources give 2002. The 2.2 million users figure for 2010 comes from the specimen and wasn't checked. The exact rules of blamming changed over the years, so the scoring described here is the general idea.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.