Newgrounds taught me about the "fair use" defense when parodying wayyyyy back when their "Teletubby fun land" got them the ire of the BBC's lawyers.
I can't find anything documenting that saga -- in fact, it looks like a lot of the early content from before the "auto portal" an early precursor to video portal like Youtube -- called such because for a spell you had to email Tom your work to be featured in the "portal" -- clicking it took you a random user contribution, and below it was a hand curated list.
People forget how innovative, on a technical level, games like "Pico's School" were in the 90s.
I still remember a computer camp counselor admonishing me "you shouldn't know what that is, you're a kid" when first shown Linux and told to "open pico" and blurted out "I didn't know Tom Fulp made linux too".
Anyways thanks for the blast to the past OP -- I had no idea the site was still thriving, happy to hear it.
(And I hope one day they can resurrect the old school "Assassin" games)
I remember reading an article about how Newgrounds was contacted by the BBC around the time the Teletubbies game was published and they thought they were in trouble for the Teletubbies game, but actually the email was about interviewing them about the success of their Club a Baby Seal game.
It was both better and worse. Much better in that every kid could create interactive web stuff. Much worse because of the reasons the plugin got finally dropped from everywhere (after which the advertisers found other ways to abuse our browsers).
Always love to see Flash games getting some love. That was a magical era in many ways, and in my opinion some Flash games rose to the level of real art.
Haven't done that in a long while but you used to be able to use Haxe as a compiler in combination of tools like swfmill converting and importing resources. Targeting flash was actually one of them primary usecases when haxe was initially released.
It's a bit different workflow than what the adobe tooling provides and in no ways a replacement for adobe animation tooling, but for a more programmer oriented workflow especially if you are using sprite based graphics it's not bad.
There was also FlashDevelop and later HaxeDevelop as IDEs (.NET based) that integrated the corresponding tooling. Both seem currently unmaintained. If you are on windows you might still be able to run the old builds. Otherwise for non flash based projects the vscode haxe extension is quite good, but might need a bit more manual build scripts for the flash stuff compared to prime time of FlashDevelop.
Yeah that headline made me feel really old and the above thought just popped into my head. Flash games remind me of my Atari 2600 in certain nostalgic ways.
And like retro consoles, Flash has a thriving preservation community with projects like Ruffle, Flashpoint, and the Internet Archive's Flash collection ensuring this cultural heritage remains playable despite the original technology being obsolete.
A fantasy of mine is to develop a fork of Unity but with an editor interface exactly like Flash, that transpiles Actionscript code to Unity's C#, or maybe a subset of typescript would be a better compromise given it's popularity (either by transpiling or by using node/deno bindings to Unity's Api), to truly make unity games as easy to make as flash games used to be, and with the option to export the project to real Unity in case you need to do something more advanced.
Perhaps some kind of Mandela effect, but I would have adamantly sworn I remember newgrounds shutting down.
My friends and I spent many hours playing games on NG and screwing around with flash. Feels like a completely different world at this point. Glad they're still around, and I love that they're running events like this to remember the good old days.
Newgrounds taught me about the "fair use" defense when parodying wayyyyy back when their "Teletubby fun land" got them the ire of the BBC's lawyers.
I can't find anything documenting that saga -- in fact, it looks like a lot of the early content from before the "auto portal" an early precursor to video portal like Youtube -- called such because for a spell you had to email Tom your work to be featured in the "portal" -- clicking it took you a random user contribution, and below it was a hand curated list.
People forget how innovative, on a technical level, games like "Pico's School" were in the 90s.
I still remember a computer camp counselor admonishing me "you shouldn't know what that is, you're a kid" when first shown Linux and told to "open pico" and blurted out "I didn't know Tom Fulp made linux too".
Anyways thanks for the blast to the past OP -- I had no idea the site was still thriving, happy to hear it.
(And I hope one day they can resurrect the old school "Assassin" games)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico%27s_School
I remember reading an article about how Newgrounds was contacted by the BBC around the time the Teletubbies game was published and they thought they were in trouble for the Teletubbies game, but actually the email was about interviewing them about the success of their Club a Baby Seal game.
https://www.newgrounds.com/tubby/wired.html
There's a press section, but nothing directly from the BBC
There was absolutely a brief legal threat paired with a comedic "fuck you we have fair use" page up on their site at one point.
I don't think they'd be talking about fair use if they were just being interviewed about how mean they allegedly were.
Aw. They dropped all the adult games, though.
They seem to be using Ruffle, the Flash emulator written in Rust which runs in WebAssembly.
(Flash was a good product in its day. Perhaps better than HTML/CSS/Javascript.)
It was both better and worse. Much better in that every kid could create interactive web stuff. Much worse because of the reasons the plugin got finally dropped from everywhere (after which the advertisers found other ways to abuse our browsers).
With chrome we went from having a plugin that's abused for malvertising to a whole browser. Google can't die fast enough.
Always love to see Flash games getting some love. That was a magical era in many ways, and in my opinion some Flash games rose to the level of real art.
I spent a lot of my childhood on Newgrounds. I’m happy to see it alive and kicking.
Same. That's a name I hadn't seen or even thought about for 25 years. Amazed it's still going.
Newgrounds, Flash games, and Mochi ads are how I got my career started. I miss how easy it was to get your game distributed all over.
I wrote a bit about it: https://austinhenley.com/blog/8lessons8games.html
Is there an open source tool to make flash games/animations? I only ever hear of adobe stuff
Haven't done that in a long while but you used to be able to use Haxe as a compiler in combination of tools like swfmill converting and importing resources. Targeting flash was actually one of them primary usecases when haxe was initially released.
It's a bit different workflow than what the adobe tooling provides and in no ways a replacement for adobe animation tooling, but for a more programmer oriented workflow especially if you are using sprite based graphics it's not bad.
There was also FlashDevelop and later HaxeDevelop as IDEs (.NET based) that integrated the corresponding tooling. Both seem currently unmaintained. If you are on windows you might still be able to run the old builds. Otherwise for non flash based projects the vscode haxe extension is quite good, but might need a bit more manual build scripts for the flash stuff compared to prime time of FlashDevelop.
The last web archive if the site went down for you too.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250818232649/https://www.newgr...
This Win98 experience is great:
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/977308
Flash is now the retro gaming console of web 1.0
This just made me feel really old.
Yeah that headline made me feel really old and the above thought just popped into my head. Flash games remind me of my Atari 2600 in certain nostalgic ways.
And like retro consoles, Flash has a thriving preservation community with projects like Ruffle, Flashpoint, and the Internet Archive's Flash collection ensuring this cultural heritage remains playable despite the original technology being obsolete.
A fantasy of mine is to develop a fork of Unity but with an editor interface exactly like Flash, that transpiles Actionscript code to Unity's C#, or maybe a subset of typescript would be a better compromise given it's popularity (either by transpiling or by using node/deno bindings to Unity's Api), to truly make unity games as easy to make as flash games used to be, and with the option to export the project to real Unity in case you need to do something more advanced.
Reminds me of https://discussions.unity.com/t/uniswf-flash-to-unity/481812 which was made by an acquaintance of mine. In this case you used the Flash editor but the SWF ran in the Unity runtime.
Perhaps some kind of Mandela effect, but I would have adamantly sworn I remember newgrounds shutting down.
My friends and I spent many hours playing games on NG and screwing around with flash. Feels like a completely different world at this point. Glad they're still around, and I love that they're running events like this to remember the good old days.
Same here, I was sure it had shut down. I'm glad I was wrong.
[dead]