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

The name goes back to 1991, when a 13-year-old Tom Fulp started a Neo Geo fanzine called New Ground and mailed it to members of a Prodigy club. In 1995 he launched a website, New Ground Remix, on a hosting service. It got its first real traffic in 1996 with Fulp’s own crude, violent web games such as Club a Seal and Assassin, made while he was a student at Drexel University.

The early site looked nothing like what Newgrounds would become. It was a personal page in the style of countless other mid-90s teenage projects. 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

Flash (released as FutureSplash Animator in 1996, renamed Macromedia Flash when Macromedia bought it later that year, and owned by Adobe from 2005) 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. In 1999 his sites were consolidated under newgrounds.com and the Portal opened, turning Newgrounds 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. It began as a place for Fulp to post his own smaller, unfinished Flash projects and soon opened to everyone. Anyone could upload a Flash animation or game. The community voted on quality during a judgment period; submissions that scored too low were deleted (“blammed”), while the best-rated work could earn front-page placement.

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 built written reviews and a 0-5 star score into every submission, an early version of the feedback systems later common on UGC sites.

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 and GameCube (2004) and an HD version on Xbox 360 via The Behemoth, the studio Paladin and Fulp co-founded with John Baez.
• 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 Michael “Krinkels” Swain) — an animation series that grew into a long-running franchise, including the 2023 game Madness: Project Nexus.
• Pico’s School (1999, by Tom Fulp) — an early point-and-click Flash game starring Pico, who became one of the site’s mascots.
• Henry Stickmin series (Marcus “PuffballsUnited” Bromander) — series of choose-your-path stick-figure Flash games that culminated in The Henry Stickmin Collection on Steam in 2020.
• Friday Night Funkin’ (2020, by ninjamuffin99, PhantomArcade, evilsk8r, and Kawai Sprite) — a rhythm game made for the Ludum Dare 47 game jam, released on Newgrounds, that became a global hit and brought Pico back to a new generation.

The Newgrounds Audio Portal also became a launching pad for musicians. Its music became a staple of indie games — Geometry Dash, for example, lets players pull songs from the Audio Portal for custom levels.

The cultural moment

Through the 2000s, Newgrounds was one of the best-known destinations on the web for animation and Flash games, and a major hub of Flash culture.

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.

Copyright and the takedown era

Like most UGC platforms, Newgrounds had to manage copyright. The site hosted plenty of parodies and fan animations built on other people’s characters, and rights holders sometimes asked for material to come down. Like later video platforms, Newgrounds relied on user uploads plus responses to complaints rather than checking everything in advance.

The Flash deprecation

In 2017, Adobe announced Flash would be discontinued at the end of 2020, and major browsers removed Flash support around that deadline. 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. It first released a downloadable Newgrounds Player, then sponsored Ruffle, an open-source Flash emulator (first released in 2019) that runs Flash content in modern browsers without the original plugin. Ruffle is incomplete, but it covers a large share of older Flash content, especially games written in earlier versions of ActionScript.

For new submissions, the site had already begun encouraging HTML5 games in 2018, alongside 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 has stayed involved in game projects, and The Behemoth studio he co-founded released the Alien Hominid follow-up Alien Hominid Invasion, in 2023. 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 pioneered 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 1999.

It also incubated a generation of creators who would later define indie animation and indie games. The Behemoth, the creators behind some later Adult Swim shows, and many 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

Much of the Newgrounds archive remains playable via Ruffle on the original site. Some of the bigger Flash games (Alien Hominid, the Henry Stickmin series) were remade or collected for 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. Its name comes from his early-1990s Neo Geo fanzine, New Ground, and his first site went up in 1995. He remains involved in the site’s operation.

What year was Newgrounds founded?

Fulp’s first site, New Ground Remix, launched in 1995. The newgrounds.com domain and the Portal followed in 1999, as Flash animation and games became widespread.

Is Newgrounds still online?

Yes. The site continues to operate and accept submissions. Around Flash’s discontinuation, Newgrounds sponsored and 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 sponsored and 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 personal site 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.

Related: The History of RuneScape (Jagex’s MMO Empire) · The History of Pogo.com: EA’s Casual Game Empire · The History of Voodoo Games (Hyper-Casual Empire)