This seemingly small but crucial change allowed content to be hosted and viewed by anyone with an internet connection. In a world pre-YouTube and social media, being able to share your favorite videos and creations was considered a marvel that shocked the minds of internet denizens around the globe.
“There was a lot of energy in the air and I was both curious and worried to see what would happen,” Tom Fulp recently told Newsweek. “No website had ever had an instant publishing system for games and movies.”
The Portal was originally launched in 1999 and created as a place for Fulp to dump his “smaller projects.” When others started to ask if they could host on his website, he obliged. As weeks went by and the SWF Flash files started to build up, Fulp and his friend Ross Snyder developed the code to allow anyone to upload their own Flash games and animation to the platform.
At its peak in the early aughts, Newgrounds was pulling in millions of views a month off of content created by the community. Videos like Egoraptor’s “Metal Gear Awesome” and games like Fulp’s own “Alien Hominid” took the bandwidth of many households and school computers. As other websites started to pop up to host content that didn’t need users to understand how to learn Flash animation, Newgrounds lost some of its luster. Still, great creatives and their masterpieces continue to be uploaded to the website to this very day, with the internet catalogue still holding strong.
In middle school, I was an introverted private school brat with more free time than common sense. Newgrounds was my life, refreshing the homepage dozens of times a day to see if my favorite creators uploaded something for me to watch as soon as possible. “Newgrounds Rumble” and “Toss the Turtle” helped get me through an awkward phase with mindless distractions. Egoraptor’s entire “Awesome” series is still one of my biggest influences, being the first piece of nerd media to show me that anyone can create.
At the end of 2020, Adobe is ending support of their Flash system and smartphones have taken the lead in content consumption. These necessary evolutions of an (arguably) more mature internet have slowed but not halted the world of Newgrounds. Users can now upload animations in video format and popular older content has been reworked for a newer generation, but a mobile app still hasn’t been developed. (“We prefer to support the open web,” Fulp said.)
The Portal might not be as ground-breaking as it once was, but on its 20-year anniversary it’s more important than ever. User-generated content on social media platforms has become the internet’s new form, with Facebook and Twitter adverts becoming part of everyday life. Newgrounds is still an escape from all of that noise, free of ads and full of the content you watched all those years ago.
“The site itself has matured in that time and maintains a focus on being a great place for people to share their animation, games, art and audio,” Fulp said. “Newgrounds is where a lot of animators and game developers got their start and where many artists, game devs and musicians have met and gone on to create wonderful things together.”
