Newgrounds facts for kids
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| Type of business | Private |
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Type of site
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Entertainment |
| Available in | English |
| Founded | 1995 |
| Headquarters |
Glenside, Pennsylvania, U.S.
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| Founder(s) | Tom Fulp |
| Key people |
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| Services |
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| Registration | Optional |
Newgrounds is a company and fun website started by Tom Fulp in 1995. It's a place where people can share their own creative work. This includes things like video games, animated films, music, and artwork. Tom Fulp also creates some of his own content from the Newgrounds offices in Glenside, Pennsylvania.
In the 2000s, Newgrounds was super important for Internet culture. It was especially big for online cartoons and independent video games. Many famous animators and game makers got their start and became popular on Newgrounds. This happened long before social media was even a thing!
Contents
What You Can Find on Newgrounds
People can upload their own creations to Newgrounds. These are then sorted into four main sections: Games, Movies, Audio, and Art.
Sharing Games and Movies
When someone uploads a Movie or Game, it goes through a process called "judgment." During this time, other users can rate it from 0 to 5 stars. They can also write reviews. The average score helps decide if the content will be "saved" (added to the site) or "blammed" (deleted). If it's "blammed," only the reviews are saved in a special "Obituaries" section.
Playing Flash Content Today
For a long time, Newgrounds used Adobe Flash Player for its games and animations. But Flash was stopped by most web browsers in late 2020. Now, Newgrounds uses something called the Ruffle emulator. Ruffle helps old Flash content work again. Newgrounds helps support Ruffle, along with other popular sites like Cool Math Games. In 2022, Ruffle could play most older Flash content. For newer Flash content, users sometimes needed to use the "Newgrounds Player," which was a special program you could download.
Art and Music on the Site
Art and Audio submissions use a different system called "scouting." This system helps make sure that only good quality content, that isn't stolen or spam, gets shown to everyone. All users can upload art and audio to their own page. But only content that is "scouted" will appear in the main public areas of the site. This system, like "judgment," helps stop stolen content, spam, or bad material from reaching the public. It relies on users and site moderators. Once a person is "scouted," they can then "scout" others. However, if someone scouts users who often break the site's rules, they might get "unscouted" themselves.
Community and Safety
Users can report content to moderators if they think it breaks the site's rules. Experienced users' reports are given more attention. The Newgrounds homepage shows off popular submissions from each category. It also gives awards to users whose work meets certain requirements. Newgrounds members also work together on animations called "collabs" using the site's discussion forums. Some people have noted that many "collabs" are started each year, but not all are finished. However, animators on the site often feel a strong sense of ownership over what they create, especially if they work alone.
Newgrounds has always been a place for many different ideas. Even though it hosted animations about various topics, it has generally had balanced discussions.
The Story of Newgrounds
How It All Started
In 1991, when he was just 13, Tom Fulp started a Neo Geo fan magazine called New Ground. He sent it to about 100 members of an online club. In 1995, he launched a website called New Ground Remix. This site became more popular in 1996 after Tom created simple games like Club a Seal and Assassin. He made these games while he was a student at Drexel University. Later, he made Club a Seal II and Assassin II. He also had another site called New Ground Atomix.
The Rise of "The Portal"
In 1999, both of Tom's websites became one: newgrounds.com. That year, he also created "The Portal." This was a section where Tom could put his smaller, unfinished Flash projects. Soon, visitors started emailing him their own Flash content. They had nowhere else to put it online. So, Tom manually created web pages for them in The Portal. By 2000, there were so many submissions that Tom's friend Ross helped make the process automatic. Tom has said that this automatic Portal "ultimately defined [Newgrounds]'s purpose."
Flash and Newgrounds' Growth
For a long time, you needed Macromedia Flash Player to play games on Newgrounds. The site brought together many people who wanted to make Flash games. It became one of the most active communities for Flash creators in English. It was also a place where many video game developers started their careers. Newgrounds once called Flash the "driving force" behind the site. Even so, people on the site didn't like poor quality work, especially when it came to humor and storytelling. Some animators from the site later moved to YouTube in the mid-2000s.
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By November 2008, Newgrounds had over 1.5 million users and more than 130,000 animations. By August 2010, these numbers grew even more. The site had over 2.2 million users and more than 180,000 games and animated films. Most of these were made by one person, but some were made by many people working together. In 2013, it was said that users had created "hundreds of thousands of animated movies and online games."
In 2010, Time magazine put Newgrounds at No. 39 on its list of "50 Best Websites."
Moving Beyond Flash
In 2018, Newgrounds started encouraging creators to submit their games in an HTML5 format instead of Flash. This was because Flash was going to be stopped soon.
In the summer of 2019, Newgrounds released the Newgrounds Player for Windows. This was a program that helped users play Flash games and movies from the site. Later, in August 2019, they also started using the Ruffle Flash emulator. Both options were offered as Ruffle got better.
Recent Updates and Awards
In April 2021, a new update for the game Friday Night Funkin' was released only on Newgrounds at first. This caused so many people to visit the site that its servers became overloaded!
In July 2021, Tom Fulp received the Game Developers Choice Awards Pioneer Award. This award recognized his important work in starting Newgrounds and his later work with The Behemoth.
In September 2023, the site updated its Art Portal. This made it easier to credit multiple artists on one submission. It also added new ways to display multiple art pieces.
In March 2024, the site's reporting system was updated. This change made it possible for users to report content that was mostly created by artificial intelligence (AI).
See also
In Spanish: Newgrounds para niños
- Internet art
- History of the Internet
- List of video game websites
