Newgrounds

American entertainment and social media website

Released: —
Platforms: Browser
Genres: —
Developers: —
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About

Newgrounds is an American entertainment website founded by Tom Fulp in 1995 and owned by Newgrounds.com, Inc. The site hosts user-generated content such as interactive games, films, audio, and artwork. Fulp produces in-house content at the headquarters and offices in Glenside, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia.

In the 2000s, Newgrounds played an important role in Internet culture, and in Internet animation and independent video gaming in particular. It has been called a "distinct time in gaming history", a place "where many animators and developers cut their teeth and gained a following long before social media was even a thing", and "a haven for fostering the greats of internet animation".

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Development

In 1991, at the age of 13, Tom Fulp launched a Neo Geo fanzine called New Ground and sent issues to approximately 100 members of a club originating on the online service Prodigy. Using a hosting service, he launched a website called New Ground Remix in 1995, which increased in popularity during the summer of 1996 after Fulp created the BBS games Club a Seal and Assassin while a student at Drexel University. He then created Club a Seal II and Assassin II, along with a separate hosting site titled New Ground Atomix. The 1999 release of Pico's School, a Flash browser game that "exhibited a complexity of design and polish in presentation that was virtually unseen in amateur Flash game development" of the time, helped establish Newgrounds as a "public force."

1999 also saw the consolidation of both sites into one domain name (newgrounds.com), and the creation of "The Portal", a place on the site for Fulp to put his Flash projects that were smaller and more unfinished. Site visitors began to reach out through email with their own Flash content, which was showcased on a webpage in The Portal. By 2000, there were so many Portal submissions that submitting Flash content to the Portal would become an automated process with the help of Fulp's friend Ross. Tom has stated that the automated Portal "ultimately defined [Newgrounds]'s purpose".