Newgrounds: One of the World's Earliest Indie Game & Animation Communities 95

The Newgrounds website has been around since 1995, when its founder Tom Fulp was still a teenager. It started as a personal homepage called "New Ground Remix," where he posted games he had made himself. In 1996, while studying at Drexel University, he created two small BBS games, "Club a Seal" and "Assassin," and the site began to gain some recognition. What truly made Newgrounds take off was "Pico's School" in 1999, a Flash game that was unusually polished for an amateur work at the time. That same year, the site switched to the newgrounds.com domain and launched "The Portal" submission system, which finally allowed creators to upload their own work.

The site is organized into four main sections. The Games portal has carried over from the Flash era into today's HTML5, offering everything from action, adventure, puzzle, and shooter to strategy games, and many indie developers post their first works here. The Movies portal is a gathering place for animated shorts, where you can find both comedic and story-driven pieces. The Audio portal lets musicians upload original music and sound effects, and game developers frequently come here to find assets or collaborate on voice acting. The Art portal launched in 2009 and features illustrations, comics, pixel art, and 3D modeling.

On the community side, registered users can rate works from 1 to 5 stars and leave comments, with voting results determining whether content stays on the site. The homepage features admin picks, along with leaderboards ranked by popularity and score. Features like forums, internal messaging, and chat rooms let creators communicate directly with each other, and many collaborative projects have started this way.

After Flash was discontinued in 2020, Newgrounds built its own dedicated player and conversion tools, and also funded the Ruffle open-source emulator project, so most of the older games and animations on the site can still be played normally. They also launched an independent API that makes it easy for developers to integrate features like achievements and leaderboards into new games.

This site has incubated a remarkable amount of creative work. "Friday Night Funkin'" is a rhythm game made in 2020 by four Newgrounds users that went on to become a worldwide hit and remains the most-played title in Newgrounds history. The protagonist of "Pico's School" from 1999, Pico, is still the site's mascot today. Classic web animations such as Eddsworld, Madness Combat, and Salad Fingers all came out of here as well.

Newgrounds is now headquartered in Glenside, Pennsylvania, and is free for all users. Sign up to upload and browse. To support the site, you can become a Supporter for $2.99 per month or $25 per year, with the main perk being an ad-free experience.

Compared with today's mainstream platforms, Newgrounds carries a strong "old internet" flavor. The barrier to creation is extremely low, moderation is relatively relaxed (there is an adult content section), community feedback is direct and sometimes quite sharp-tongued, and creators and audiences are very close to each other. It is not as commercialized as Steam or the App Store, and feels more like a giant digital playground where all kinds of experimental, niche, or even strange works can find an audience.

Newgrounds is still running today. Although it isn't as bustling as it once was, it remains a preserved piece of old ground within the indie game and animation community, and people are still releasing new work on it.