Newgrounds: the Flash portal that never closed

By Obscure Internet 26 Oct 2026 10 min read

Newgrounds is a free website where anyone can upload their own games, cartoons, music and art, and it’s still open. Tom Fulp started it as a teenager’s hobby site in 1995, and in 2000 its Portal let anyone post their homemade Flash cartoons and games, to be voted up by the crowd or “blammed” out of existence.

If you were online in the 2000s, you probably watched something that started there, even if you never typed the address yourself. Here’s how a site built on Flash outlived Flash.

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What is Newgrounds?

It’s a portal for things people make themselves. There are four main sections, for games, movies (mostly animation), audio and art, and the work in them comes from the people who use the site. Newgrounds itself describes the movies section as an animation festival: some of it is brilliant, some of it is a beginner’s first go, and the audience is generally entertained.

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That was always the deal. You didn’t need a publisher, a TV channel or even your own website. You needed a copy of Flash, an idea and a thick skin.

When was Newgrounds created?

Earlier than you’d think. In 1991, a 13-year-old Tom Fulp made a fanzine about the Neo Geo games console called New Ground, publishing it from his parents’ basement in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, and sending issues to around 100 members of a club on the Prodigy online service. (Neo means new, geo means ground. He was 13.)

When he got his first web space in 1995, he kept the name and called the site New Ground Remix. Nothing much happened until the end of the summer of 1996, when he made two small web games, Club a Seal and Assassin, and the site suddenly had fans. At Drexel University he started a second site, New Ground Atomix, and in 1998 he began experimenting with Macromedia Flash.

The name we know came from a phone call. In late September 1998 the TV show Inside Edition called about doing a piece on Assassin, and Fulp decided the site needed a proper web address viewers could remember. He chose “Newgrounds”, plural, merged everything under newgrounds.com, and paid $33 a month out of his own pocket to host it. Inside Edition never called back. The name stuck anyway.

So if you’re asking how old Newgrounds is, the honest answer is 1995 for the website, 1998 for the name, and 1991 if you count the zine.

How did the Portal work?

In 1999 Fulp made a page called The Portal, a place to dump his own smaller and unfinished Flash projects. People started emailing him their own Flash files, and for each one he built a web page by hand. It was a nice little gallery, until there were too many to keep up with.

So his friend Ross built a system to take submissions automatically, and the automated Portal launched on 6 April 2000. Fulp says it was the first website to offer instant, self-serve publishing for games and cartoons. Nobody approved your work before it went up. The audience judged it afterwards.

Every new submission went through judgment. Visitors voted on it, and if it didn’t reach a high enough score by the end, it was blammed: deleted, gone. A cartoon could go up after school and be gone before your friends had a chance to see it. The ones that survived could reach the front page, the weekly awards and, for the lucky few, every school computer in the country.

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Look at the numbers at the bottom of that 2002 Portal page. The day before it was saved, 189 new entries came in and 181 were deleted. There was a weekly award for the best of them and another, the Turd of the Week, for the worst. It was harsh, and it was hugely entertaining, unless the turd was yours.

The tank arrived the same year as the automated Portal. A friend of Fulp’s, Andrew Brozyna, drew the Newgrounds tank logo in 2000, along with the little icons that showed how much voting power each user had earned. By the end of the year, Newgrounds had one of the busiest communities on the internet and four employees.

What started on Newgrounds?

A lot of the 2000s internet, one cartoon at a time. A few highlights:

• Pico. Fulp’s own Pico’s School came out in 1999. He’s still proud of the engineering: Flash 3 didn’t even support variables, so he came up with “a very complex work-around” to keep track of the game. In 2021, as an April Fools’ joke, he gave it “a more appropriate story”. Pico became one of the site’s best-loved characters, with his own Pico Day every spring since 2006.
• Alien Hominid. In 2002 Fulp teamed up with Dan Paladin to make Alien Hominid, a Flash game. On 1 April 2003, the pair and some of Paladin’s co-workers formed a studio, The Behemoth, to make a console version, which reached the shops in November 2004.
• Castle Crashers. The Behemoth’s Castle Crashers came out on Xbox Live Arcade in August 2008. In 2021 the Game Developers Choice Awards gave Fulp its Pioneer Award, for creating Newgrounds and keeping it going.
• Salad Fingers. David Firth’s deeply odd cartoon, with its famous line “I like rusty spoons”, first appeared on Newgrounds on 1 July 2004. Firth was still making it twenty years later, and Newgrounds helped pay for its 13th episode in 2023.
• Madness Combat. It was already in the Portal’s all-time top 50 by December 2002, and it’s had its own Madness Day on the site every September since 2007, hosted in recent years by its creator, Krinkels.

And that’s before you get to the thousands of games and cartoons that were famous for a week in your form room and then never spoken of again. They were Newgrounds too.

What happened to Newgrounds when Flash died?

Newgrounds saw it coming earlier than most. In 2011 the team built a tool called Swivel to turn old Flash cartoons into ordinary video files. In 2012 they launched a full redesign, added a video player so cartoons no longer had to be Flash, and from October 2012 accepted HTML5 games, which Fulp called making it official that Newgrounds “won’t live or die by Flash”.

The trouble was the archive. By the end of the 2010s the site held more than 20 years of Flash games and cartoons, and the browsers were about to stop playing them. Newgrounds tried two things at once.

The first was the Newgrounds Player, a Windows program that took over whenever you opened Flash content on the site. Its download page promised “NO hidden surprises (malware/adware/tracking/etc)”.

EXHIBIT

The second was Ruffle. In August 2019 Newgrounds announced it had spent months working on an open-source Flash emulator, written in the Rust programming language, that would run inside an ordinary browser. Fulp warned there was “no guarantee it will ultimately emulate everything”: it would have to work through the older Flash games before it could tackle the newer ones built with ActionScript 3. In 2020 Newgrounds started switching classic Flash over to Ruffle, a batch at a time.

On 12 January 2021, the day Newgrounds calls the true “End of Flash”, Adobe began blocking Flash content from running in Flash Player. That January and February, Newgrounds hosted a jam for brand new Flash games, made to run through Ruffle, and it kept paying towards the emulator, including $6,000 in 2021 alone. In the second half of 2024 it switched on Ruffle for thousands more games, and Ruffle’s developers now say most games made with ActionScript 3 work well enough to play.

So the old stuff is still where you left it. You can play the games and watch the cartoons on Newgrounds itself, uploaded by the people who made them. Most of it plays in the browser with nothing to install; the few old games Ruffle can’t run yet still need the Newgrounds Player. The wider story of the plug-in, and of Miniclip, Kongregate and the rest, is in What happened to Flash games?

Is Newgrounds still around?

Yes. It’s still run by Tom Fulp, and it’s still taking new games, cartoons, music and art from anyone who wants to post them.

It even had a second wind. Friday Night Funkin’, a rhythm game made for the Ludum Dare game jam in October 2020, went up on Newgrounds on 1 November 2020. Its four creators had all met on the site, and PC Gamer reported that they wanted to make “the Newgrounds game they’ve always wanted”. When its Week 7 update came out on 18 April 2021, the traffic knocked Newgrounds offline, and once it came back the game broke the site’s one-day record with 1.2 million views. Pico turned up in it, and that year’s Pico Day was the biggest in years.

If you’ve come here because Newgrounds won’t load right now, we can’t check its servers from a museum. A bad day isn’t a closure, though, and it’s been through plenty of them since 1995.

Is Newgrounds free?

Yes. You can watch, play and listen without paying, and making an account is free too. The one exception is adult-rated work in the UK and Australia, where a newer account has to pay for a Supporter upgrade before it can prove its age (more on that below).

The money comes from Supporters. In 2012 Newgrounds started selling a $25-a-year upgrade that took the ads away, and in January 2020 it removed most third-party ads from the site and asked for $3 a month or $25 a year instead. In October 2026 the Supporter page started at $5 a month or $36 a year, with perks including no ads and a weekly Takeover Tuesday, when Supporters can feature their own work on the front page.

Is Newgrounds safe?

It’s a legitimate, long-running site with its own moderators, rules and ways to flag things that break them. But it isn’t a children’s site, and it’s never pretended to be.

Newgrounds hosts work made for adults alongside work for everyone. Work on the site is rated E, T, M or A, with A for adult content, and the browse pages let you filter by rating. In 2022 the site spread its ratings filters to blogs, user pages and almost everywhere else, to make people “less likely to stumble into things they don’t want or shouldn’t see”. Ratings are chosen by the person who uploads the work, so they’re a filter, not a guarantee.

Since September 2025, visitors in the UK have had to prove they’re over 18 to see A-rated work, to meet the Online Safety Act, and Australia followed in March 2026. Accounts more than ten years old are assumed to be adults. Most others become a Supporter, which Newgrounds says covers the verification fee, and then check their age with a company called Yoti, where the quickest way is a face scan. Newgrounds says it only gets a pass or a fail back.

Its terms say you must be over 16 to use the site at all, with a parent’s consent if you’re under 18, and they put it more bluntly than most: if you’re under 16, please leave, as “there are lots of other, more pleasant web sites out there that won’t horrify your delicate parents”. If you’re a parent of a younger child, take the hint.

Newgrounds timeline

• 1991: Tom Fulp, aged 13, starts New Ground, a Neo Geo fanzine.
• 1995: He puts New Ground Remix on the web.
• 1996: Club a Seal and Assassin bring the site its first fans.
• September 1998: A call from Inside Edition prompts the newgrounds.com address.
• 1999: Pico’s School, and the first version of the Portal.
• 6 April 2000: The automated Portal launches, and anyone can publish.
• 2002: Fulp and Dan Paladin make the Flash game Alien Hominid.
• 1 April 2003: The Behemoth is formed to take Alien Hominid to consoles.
• 1 July 2004: Salad Fingers first appears on Newgrounds.
• November 2004: Alien Hominid reaches the shops.
• 2006: A new tank logo and slogan, “Everything, by Everyone”, and the first Pico Day.
• August 2008: Castle Crashers comes out on Xbox Live Arcade.
• 2012: A redesign, a video player, the Supporter upgrade and HTML5 games.
• 2019: The Newgrounds Player arrives, and Newgrounds announces Ruffle.
• 12 January 2021: Flash Player stops running content; Newgrounds keeps going with Ruffle.
• 18 April 2021: Friday Night Funkin’s Week 7 knocks the site offline.
• July 2021: Tom Fulp receives the Pioneer Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards.
• 2026: Still open, still free and still run by the man who started it.

There’s more from the same years in the Messenger Years, and if Newgrounds has made you miss the little grey jigsaw piece that replaced so many games, there’s a card for Adobe Flash Player is blocked.

From the museum