Newgrounds
What it is
Newgrounds is a website, founded by Tom Fulp in the 1990s, that became one of the defining homes for user-submitted Flash animation and games during the Flash era of the web. Unlike a curated storefront, Newgrounds worked, and still works, as an open portal: almost anyone could upload an animation, game, piece of art, or song, and audience voting decided what rose to prominence. That open, low-barrier model made it a launching pad for an enormous number of independent animators, musicians, and game developers who had no other easy way to reach an audience at the time.
Culture and community
Newgrounds is closely associated with the style of irreverent, fast, often absurd internet animation that flourished on Flash-era portals — short cartoons made by one or a few people rather than a studio, distributed for free, and judged directly by an audience through comments and ratings rather than by a broadcaster or publisher. Its own house mascot, Pico, began as a character in one of Fulp's early Flash pieces and became enough of a community fixture that Newgrounds still marks an annual "Pico Day," celebrating the site's history and its creators.
Newgrounds also became a genuine career on-ramp: several animators, musicians, and developers who first found an audience there went on to commercial success elsewhere, including at least one Newgrounds-original game concept that was later developed into a fully commercial release. The site's revenue-sharing and audience-support tools, letting fans support creators directly, were, for a long time, one of the few ways an independent Flash creator could make money from their work at all.
Surviving the end of Flash
Because Newgrounds' entire back catalogue — decades of animation and games — was built on Flash, the shutdown of Flash Player at the end of 2020 threatened to make almost all of it unplayable overnight. Rather than losing that history, Newgrounds adopted Ruffle, the open-source Flash emulator, to keep its existing library running in visitors' browsers without the original plugin. That move is one of the more visible, successful examples of Flash-era content surviving its own platform's death, and it's part of why Newgrounds is still cited as a living archive rather than a historical footnote.
Newgrounds today
Newgrounds continues to operate as a hub for independent animation, games, art, and music, well past the era that made it famous. It sits alongside archival projects like Flashpoint as one of the places where Flash-era creative work is still actually reachable and playable today, rather than only remembered.