I remember playing a crap web game in college, kinda like gunslinger, where you try to shoot people who turn around with a gun (and not those without). When I graduated college, Ian--one of my good friends at work--ended up being one of those guys in the game! Turns out that game I was playing was built by Tom Fulp, and he was using his friends (like Ian) as characters in his games pre-Newgrounds. All that messing around with crap games on the internet paid off. He had started Newgrounds while in college, and had quit to do it.
Met Tom once, and he was a cool guy, but he didn't believe in the stuff that they taught in CS. He had a long rant about how learning string diff algorithms were useless. Anyway, it turns out later on, he went back to college to finish his degree. When his classmate(s) found out who he was, this one kid was so excited to sit next to him. "Do you know who he is?!" he would exclaim to his professor, to Tom's embarrassment. I wonder if he had to do string diff algos when he went back to finish college.
It's cool to see how far Ruffle has come in making flash games playable without flash. Was able to go check out a flash game I uploaded 15 years ago on here, and it's completely playable now, when I just assumed it was gone forever. There's so much content on Newgrounds and similar sites that isn't lost to time because of it, makes me want to go spend a few hours reliving the olden days.
Almost brings a tear to my eye to see they still have all the games and stupid Flash animations I submitted as a middle schooler, hacking around with his friends going on 25 years ago, just hoping not to get “blammed”. I’m sure these days kids are doing the same in Roblox or Minecraft or whatever - maybe it’s the same, but it feels so much more commercial than the heyday of Newgrounds. A special time to have been online for sure.
So fun to see my music (created when I was 15 years old) is still sitting there! Sadly though my flash animations (that were 'blammed'[0] almost immediately) aren't there, which I wish I could find somehow.
Nice to see Newgrounds is still alive and more or less unchanged since its early days. With so many of the creative spaces online becoming highly censored hellholes, having a more laissez-faire platform is a breath of fresh air.
One of the worst cultural developments of this century has been creative people becoming censorship-hungry prudes. There is a certain romanticism about being anti-establishment, but then they became the establishment and couldn’t figure out what to do next.
Time to play some Nuclear Eagle. It's a game where you're a momma eagle feeding your chicks. Except you're giant and feed them people. And people don't like being eaten, so it has some GTA-style escalation.
Maybe just nostalgia talking, but the height of Newgrounds really seemed like a golden age for light gaming. The shift to mobile games has just resulted in a large number of gambling simulators, which I'm sure has been a key reason for the popularity of Kalshi, Polymarket, etc.
I'd say the shift to mobile went through a similar arc into decline as the web, actually.
Newgrounds really was the golden age for web gaming. And, similar to early web, early mobile gaming also started out with nostalgia-worthy charm and heart. You're right that it's been hollowed out, but the same thing happened to web gaming after the Flash era. The social casino era is maybe its 6th reinvention, and its lowest yet.
Now that mobile gaming has been raced to the bottom and consolidated (and thanks to the dual tailwinds of AI making it easy to write code without engines and the web maturing in its 3d+networking capabilities) we're started to see a resurgence of web-based games - it's my full-time job now! Granted we still do rely on mobile apps (as web wrappers) for monetization, but that wall is crumbling rapidly.
that's quite a reach. much more obviously, the shift to mobile games has resulted in predatory pay2win "micro"transactions and ads everywhere. the last time I'd tried to find something new to play on the shitter, seemingly every random game I got from the playstore wanted an AAA's worth of $ to unlock features and/or was full of ads. and they weren't even those coomer bait gachas everyone with half a brain knows to avoid.
The crazy thing is there was a period between Newgrounds games and mobile games: Facebook games. It was so popular at that moment and so insignificant hindsight that we barely remember it.
That seems a reach to say the popularity of kalshi and polymarket is down to gambling simulators.
Id wager (heh) that it's much more down to a lack of regulation combined with the normalisation of influencer driven get rich quick but pretend it's clever investing that exploded in popularity with crypto and wallstreetbets style influencer investing. Combine that with house prices being where they are and people get risky with investing as their hope outstrips their caution.
I don't think a few rounds of balatro or slotomania leads to that.
Gambling aside, the median quality of a modern mobile game is worse than what we had on newgrounds.
NG didn't have multiple 500MB downloads, buttons in the wrong place, pointless currencies. More importantly NG artists actually cared. I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.
> I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.
WebAssembly is better compilation target and runtime than Flash ever was. Many languages can compile to WebAssembly.
I think what you want is an authoring tool like Flash. Why not make that tool? Or if you don't want to make it, Rive's a pretty good animation engine. You can make games with it:
Assuming you're not looking at the file sizes involved...
SWF is extremely compact, since it was intended to be used over a dialup connection. Flash worked because the player was preinstalled on the computer.
The newer Ruffle player is a 10MB download in addition to the actual flash file. You get a new freshly downloaded copy of Ruffle from every site that's hosting Flash content.
What a treat to see this pop up here. I used to be obsessed with Madness flash shorts back in the day. Got me into Flash and web tooling in general. A testament to the prime 2000s web.
I remember playing a crap web game in college, kinda like gunslinger, where you try to shoot people who turn around with a gun (and not those without). When I graduated college, Ian--one of my good friends at work--ended up being one of those guys in the game! Turns out that game I was playing was built by Tom Fulp, and he was using his friends (like Ian) as characters in his games pre-Newgrounds. All that messing around with crap games on the internet paid off. He had started Newgrounds while in college, and had quit to do it.
Met Tom once, and he was a cool guy, but he didn't believe in the stuff that they taught in CS. He had a long rant about how learning string diff algorithms were useless. Anyway, it turns out later on, he went back to college to finish his degree. When his classmate(s) found out who he was, this one kid was so excited to sit next to him. "Do you know who he is?!" he would exclaim to his professor, to Tom's embarrassment. I wonder if he had to do string diff algos when he went back to finish college.
was the "crap" web game brain-splatters by any chance?
I suppose he was right, just ~20 years too early...
It's cool to see how far Ruffle has come in making flash games playable without flash. Was able to go check out a flash game I uploaded 15 years ago on here, and it's completely playable now, when I just assumed it was gone forever. There's so much content on Newgrounds and similar sites that isn't lost to time because of it, makes me want to go spend a few hours reliving the olden days.
Almost brings a tear to my eye to see they still have all the games and stupid Flash animations I submitted as a middle schooler, hacking around with his friends going on 25 years ago, just hoping not to get “blammed”. I’m sure these days kids are doing the same in Roblox or Minecraft or whatever - maybe it’s the same, but it feels so much more commercial than the heyday of Newgrounds. A special time to have been online for sure.
Is my old college dorm neighbor Tim P in the chat? Holy flashback from the era of java-everything
So fun to see my music (created when I was 15 years old) is still sitting there! Sadly though my flash animations (that were 'blammed'[0] almost immediately) aren't there, which I wish I could find somehow.
[0] - https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/599831
I haven't played Fancy Pants Adventures close to 20 years... what a blast from the past.
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/301341
I'm glad that Newgrounds is one of those sites that has kept it's soul all these years.
Even the same old games are still there
Hell yeah Pico's School is still up https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/310349
Stuff that I made in 2005 is still there https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/267616
I remember watching Salad Fingers on there and playing tons of idle and tower defence games; good times
Salad fingers.
That was the creepiest thing ever when it came out.
Rusty spoons.
I like it when the red water comes out
Don’t know what my childhood would have been like without the dress up Brittany spears game! https://web.archive.org/web/20050120091734/http://www.newgro...
This is really depressing to look at in 2026! The internet really was a mistake.
I literally thought of newgrounds today and how different and wild it would be with world models and AI generated games. Then it shows up #1… wild.
> AI generated games
I really wish that will never happen. For now it produces crappy clones of existing games
Nice to see Newgrounds is still alive and more or less unchanged since its early days. With so many of the creative spaces online becoming highly censored hellholes, having a more laissez-faire platform is a breath of fresh air.
One of the worst cultural developments of this century has been creative people becoming censorship-hungry prudes. There is a certain romanticism about being anti-establishment, but then they became the establishment and couldn’t figure out what to do next.
Tupac, you ate my cheetohs!
Time to play some Nuclear Eagle. It's a game where you're a momma eagle feeding your chicks. Except you're giant and feed them people. And people don't like being eaten, so it has some GTA-style escalation.
New Mandela effect unlocked: "Remember when newgrounds ceased to exist?"
Or maybe I'm just not paying attention...
Maybe just nostalgia talking, but the height of Newgrounds really seemed like a golden age for light gaming. The shift to mobile games has just resulted in a large number of gambling simulators, which I'm sure has been a key reason for the popularity of Kalshi, Polymarket, etc.
I'd say the shift to mobile went through a similar arc into decline as the web, actually.
Newgrounds really was the golden age for web gaming. And, similar to early web, early mobile gaming also started out with nostalgia-worthy charm and heart. You're right that it's been hollowed out, but the same thing happened to web gaming after the Flash era. The social casino era is maybe its 6th reinvention, and its lowest yet.
Now that mobile gaming has been raced to the bottom and consolidated (and thanks to the dual tailwinds of AI making it easy to write code without engines and the web maturing in its 3d+networking capabilities) we're started to see a resurgence of web-based games - it's my full-time job now! Granted we still do rely on mobile apps (as web wrappers) for monetization, but that wall is crumbling rapidly.
I would argue the height of light gaming was the height of Kongregate, which was a little past newgrounds' own.
The games were more polished by the time, but still quite wild.
that's quite a reach. much more obviously, the shift to mobile games has resulted in predatory pay2win "micro"transactions and ads everywhere. the last time I'd tried to find something new to play on the shitter, seemingly every random game I got from the playstore wanted an AAA's worth of $ to unlock features and/or was full of ads. and they weren't even those coomer bait gachas everyone with half a brain knows to avoid.
The crazy thing is there was a period between Newgrounds games and mobile games: Facebook games. It was so popular at that moment and so insignificant hindsight that we barely remember it.
That seems a reach to say the popularity of kalshi and polymarket is down to gambling simulators.
Id wager (heh) that it's much more down to a lack of regulation combined with the normalisation of influencer driven get rich quick but pretend it's clever investing that exploded in popularity with crypto and wallstreetbets style influencer investing. Combine that with house prices being where they are and people get risky with investing as their hope outstrips their caution.
I don't think a few rounds of balatro or slotomania leads to that.
Gambling aside, the median quality of a modern mobile game is worse than what we had on newgrounds.
NG didn't have multiple 500MB downloads, buttons in the wrong place, pointless currencies. More importantly NG artists actually cared. I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.
> I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.
WebAssembly is better compilation target and runtime than Flash ever was. Many languages can compile to WebAssembly.
I think what you want is an authoring tool like Flash. Why not make that tool? Or if you don't want to make it, Rive's a pretty good animation engine. You can make games with it:
https://rive.app/
https://rive.app/docs/scripting/demos
Assuming you're not looking at the file sizes involved...
SWF is extremely compact, since it was intended to be used over a dialup connection. Flash worked because the player was preinstalled on the computer.
The newer Ruffle player is a 10MB download in addition to the actual flash file. You get a new freshly downloaded copy of Ruffle from every site that's hosting Flash content.
> Assuming you're not looking at the file sizes involved
The internet has very much moved on.
A three minute, 1080p YouTube music video encoded in AV1 video with Opus audio is 30 megabytes. No one bats an eyelash at downloading that.
To prove it, this one has been downloaded 2.6 billion times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekr2nIex040
To even further prove it, this one has been downloaded 17 billion times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w
> I understand why Apple killed Flash
In retrospect, it turns out the reasons were a load of bollocks. Modern web is 10 times more bloated than Flash ever was, and nobody cares.
Wasn't the main reason that it was really difficult to keep the sandbox secure?
Thank God we made the web so much safer!!
There's at least one industry that reaaaaally got fucked with the sunsetting of Flash: e learning
What a treat to see this pop up here. I used to be obsessed with Madness flash shorts back in the day. Got me into Flash and web tooling in general. A testament to the prime 2000s web.
These are amazing, will there be an AI label? Would be good to give love and support to human game devs and not AI slop
Site is loading super slow for me. Anyone else?
20 second stall loading CSS from some external site.
Heli Attack 3