The History of Newgrounds: Tom Fulp’s Flash Empire

Newgrounds started as a teenager’s hobby site in 1995 and grew into one of the most influential platforms in early web culture. The history of Newgrounds is the history of Flash animation, browser games before “browser games” was a category, and a creator community that launched the careers of dozens of animators, musicians, and game developers who would later define the indie scene. It’s also the rare story of a site that survived the death of its core technology and is still online today.

The 1995 origin

Tom Fulp founded Newgrounds in 1995 while he was still in high school in Pennsylvania. The earliest versions of the site were hosted on a free service and built around Fulp’s own comics and short games. The name “Newgrounds” referenced a comic Fulp had created called “Neon Ground Zero.”

The early site looked nothing like what Newgrounds would become. It was a personal fan page in the style of countless other mid-90s teenage projects — animated GIFs, links to friends’ sites, comics scanned in low resolution. What made it different was Fulp’s persistence: where most personal sites of the era went stale within a year, Newgrounds kept growing.

The Flash era begins

Adobe Flash (originally Macromedia Flash, released as FutureSplash in 1996 and renamed Flash in 1997) gave Newgrounds its eventual identity. Flash let creators build interactive animations and games that ran in any browser via the Flash plugin. The barrier to entry was low — you needed Flash software and basic programming knowledge — and the output was self-contained .swf files that could be uploaded and embedded easily.

Fulp recognized Flash’s potential early. By the late 1990s, Newgrounds had pivoted from a hand-drawn-comics site into a Flash content platform. Users could upload their own animations and games, the site hosted them, and visitors could browse, rate, and review.

This was novel. Most websites of the era were either professional publications or static personal sites. Newgrounds was something in between — a curated user-generated content platform years before “UGC platform” was a recognized category.

The Portal and the rating system

Newgrounds’ Portal was the open submission queue. Anyone could upload a Flash animation or game. The community voted on quality. High-rated submissions made it to the front page; low-rated submissions were removed.

This system pre-dated and arguably anticipated YouTube’s algorithmic prominence model. The Portal was democratic in a specific way — visibility was earned by quality (as judged by the community), not by editorial decision. The downside was the well-documented hostility of the voting community toward perceived low-effort content, which created a Darwinian filter that some creators thrived under and others resented.

Newgrounds also pioneered the “review and score” feature for submitted content, with a 0-5 star average shown prominently on every submission.

Signature games and animations

The list of significant work that originated or was hosted on Newgrounds is long. Highlights:

• Alien Hominid (2002, by Dan Paladin and Tom Fulp) — a Flash run-and-gun that later got console releases on PS2, GameCube, and Xbox via The Behemoth, the studio Paladin and Fulp founded.
• Castle Crashers (2008) — The Behemoth’s beat-em-up that became a hit on Xbox Live Arcade, traceable directly to the Newgrounds creator community.
• Salad Fingers (2004, by David Firth) — surreal horror animation series that became a viral phenomenon.
• Madness Combat (2002, by Krinkels) — ongoing animation series that’s been continuously updated for over two decades.
• Pico’s School (1999, by Tom Fulp) — early Newgrounds platformer featuring the unofficial mascot of the site.
• Henry Stickmin series (Marcus “PuffballsUnited” Bromander) — series of interactive stick-figure animations that culminated in a Steam release.

The Newgrounds Audio Portal also became a launching pad for musicians, including some who went on to mainstream careers. The site’s audio-licensing system let game developers easily license community music for their projects.

The cultural moment

From roughly 2003 to 2010, Newgrounds was one of the most-visited sites on the early social web for animation and Flash games. Its peak traffic put it in the top 100 sites in the United States by some rankings.

The site’s culture was distinct — irreverent, frequently crude, with a strong streak of meme creation that fed into broader internet culture. Many widely-circulated images and animations of the early internet either originated on or were popularized through Newgrounds.

The Newgrounds Flash collaborative projects — collabs where multiple animators contributed scenes to a single longer work — were a recurring event format and a creator-development pipeline.

Crash Bandicoot and the cease-and-desist era

Like most UGC platforms, Newgrounds had to manage copyright takedowns. The site was at various points the host of parodies, ROM hacks, fan animations, and outright unauthorized content. Major publishers occasionally sent takedown notices, and Fulp’s team would comply. The site’s general policy was to host first and respond to specific complaints, similar to YouTube’s later model.

The Flash deprecation

By the late 2010s, Adobe announced Flash would be discontinued at the end of 2020. Browsers dropped Flash support shortly after. This was an existential threat to Newgrounds — the bulk of the site’s two-decade archive was Flash content.

Newgrounds responded by building and championing alternative playback. The site adopted Ruffle, an open-source Flash emulator that runs Flash content in modern browsers without the original plugin. Ruffle is incomplete but covers a large portion of historical Flash content, including most Newgrounds-hosted games.

For new submissions, the site shifted to HTML5 games and modern video formats for animation. The combination of HTML5 acceptance and Ruffle preservation kept the archive accessible.

Newgrounds today

The site remains operational, run by Tom Fulp and a small team. It’s smaller than its peak — the explosion of competing platforms (YouTube for video, itch.io for indie games, social media for short-form content) absorbed audiences that once would have visited Newgrounds. But the core community is still there, the Portal still accepts submissions, and the archive remains one of the most complete records of late-1990s to mid-2010s web animation and game culture in existence.

Fulp continues to make games occasionally — most recently in collaboration with new generations of Newgrounds creators. The Behemoth studio he co-founded continues to ship commercial games. For the Flash-game ecosystem broader context, see our history of Flash games piece, which covers the technology side of why so much of this material had to be preserved separately.

Why Newgrounds matters

Newgrounds invented and validated several patterns that became standard in the social web: open content submission with community voting, persistent creator profiles, embedded media that travels via direct URL. The site was doing what YouTube would do in 2005 and what Reddit would do in 2006 — except Newgrounds had been doing it since roughly 1999.

It also incubated a generation of creators who would later define indie animation and indie games. The Behemoth, Adult Swim’s animation pipeline, and dozens of working animators trace their starts to Newgrounds submissions. The site’s contribution to the creator economy predates the term.

For the full timeline and citation trail, the Wikipedia Newgrounds article is the canonical reference.

Play Newgrounds-era content today

Most of the Newgrounds archive remains playable via Ruffle on the original site. Many of the bigger Flash games (Alien Hominid, the Henry Stickmin series) have been ported to commercial platforms. For an experience in the same casual-browser-game spirit but lighter on history, the Chrome Dino game runs in any modern browser with no plugins required.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Newgrounds?

Tom Fulp founded Newgrounds in 1995 while he was in high school. He remains involved in the site’s operation as of 2026.

What year was Newgrounds founded?

1995. The site started as a fan page for Fulp’s comic work and pivoted to Flash animation and games as Flash technology became widespread in the late 1990s.

Is Newgrounds still online?

Yes. The site continues to operate and accept submissions. After Flash’s discontinuation, Newgrounds adopted the Ruffle emulator to preserve historical Flash content and shifted new submissions to HTML5 and modern formats.

What games came out of Newgrounds?

Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers (both by The Behemoth, co-founded by Tom Fulp) are the most prominent. The Henry Stickmin series and dozens of other Flash games started as Newgrounds submissions before reaching wider audiences.

How does Newgrounds preserve old Flash content?

The site adopted Ruffle, an open-source Flash emulator that runs in modern browsers without Adobe’s discontinued plugin. Most of the archive remains accessible, though some games with unusual ActionScript features don’t yet emulate perfectly.

The bottom line

Newgrounds is one of the most consequential platforms in early web history, and it’s the rare one that’s still standing in something close to its original form. From a 1995 fan page to a creator pipeline that fed the indie animation and game scene, the site’s three-decade run is a case study in how persistence and community can outlast both their technology and their era.