Newgrounds is a website that hosts Macromedia Flash animations and games. It was created and is currently owned by Tom Fulp, who is assisted by his brother Wade Fulp. This site allows its users to submit their own Flash movies, games, and music, and view submissions from other users. Over the years Newgrounds has grown to an incredible size, and with so much material to offer, it must rely on the willing cooperation and support of its many visitors in order to function properly. Visitors are encouraged to review the various submissions that they encounter on the site, as a means of providing other potential visitors with a vague idea of what they can expect from the many flash movies and games to choose from. A user-friendly system of voting and rating produces lists that directs visitors to the most popular flash movies and allows the Newgrounds site designers to easily locate any material that might be considered for deletion or promotion. This system of public voting creates a sense of community in Newgrounds and keeps visitors coming back for more. The site now has over 860,000 registered members and over 68,000 submissions.
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Web Based |
| Founded | 1995 |
| Founder | Tom Fulp |
| Headquarters | Perkasie, Pennsylvania, United States |
Key people | Tom Fulp, Founder Wade Fulp, Administration |
| Products | Animations, Games, Audio |
| Revenue | Unknown |
Number of employees | 4 |
| Website | www.newgrounds.com |
On July 6, 2005, Newgrounds celebrated its ten year anniversary.
Experience points and levels
Stat whores want stats so we give it to em.
Voting system and reviews
The Newgrounds voting and rating system functions something like this: Submissions can be rated on a scale of 0 to 5 and are removed if their average rating (determined by both the average score and the number of users who have voted while the movie is still "under judgement") falls below a certain level. This process of removal is known as blamming.
Members may also post textual reviews for submissions already accepted into the main site. Such reviews provide authors with valuable user feedback that can motivate or discourage them in their future attempts at creating flash movies or games. Any visitor to the site is also allowed to view any past reviews to any movie accepted into the main site, thus providing visitors with an idea of the kinds of people who like visit Newgrounds. And though Newgrounds encourages users to give out only constructive criticism, abusive reviews are very frequently encountered, which is why members can also vote on whether they found a certain review useful, not useful, or abusive; these votes are quickly relayed to a group of moderators (mods for short) who assembled to remove any overly abusive review, thus preserving the friendly nature of the site.
Portal awards
When a movie or game is submitted to the Flash Portal, it has the chance to win any of the following awards:
- Daily Feature: The award given to the submission that scored the highest for the day.
- Daily 2nd/3rd/4th/5th Place: Lesser awards given to submissions each day.
- Weekly Users Choice: The award given to the submission that scored the highest for the week.
- Weekly 2nd/3rd/4th/5th Place: Lesser awards given to submissions each week.
- Review Crew Pick: This award is given to the submission with the best "overall" score in reviews.
- Underdog of the Week: This award is given to the submission with the highest ratio of voting scores to review scores, or vice-versa.
- Turd of the Week: It is given to the submission with the lowest score that manages to pass judgment.
Audio portal
The audio portal is basically identical to the flash portal except for a few differences. First off and most obviously, the former is for sounds whereas the latter is for flash movies and games. One does not gain experience points for voting on audio portal entries. As with the flash portal, all content submitted must have been created by the user submitting it. Radiogrounds is an offshoot of Newgrounds, featuring various members of the Newgrounds community DJing.
The use of songs that are ripped from CD's or downloaded as MP3's are used often and could, theorically, lead to problems with the publishers of the songs for unauthorized use. The audio portal was placed in Newgrounds to provide royalty-free music and sounds for use in the various flash movies and games submitted to the flash portal to avoid problems from popular publishers and artists.
BBS
The BBS (short for Bulletin Board System) is a very popular forum on the site, which consists of multiple forums. Some are all access, where all users are welcome to read, post and reply. Some are reply-only, where you can't start a new topic, but are welcome to read and reply to existing topics. Other forums are private, for use by moderators. Thanks to the moderators, it is kept relatively free of spam. Site administrator, Wade Fulp, also clears the BBS of spam by deleting accounts that violate rules, a process which he calls 'terminating' or 'axing'. Next to the Flash Portal, the BBS seems to be the most popular part of the site.
Timeline
1995
- Tom launched his first website, New Ground Remix.
1996
- Tom created the Flash files Cat Dynamics and Beep Me Jesus
1998
- Tom started to experiment with Macromedia Flash and created a Flash front page for New Ground Atomix.
- The now infamous Telebubby Fun Land Flash movie was made.
- Tom received a call from Inside Edition, who planned to publish a story on his Flash game Assassin.
1999
- Tom was forced to change servers and web hosts multiple times to meet the ever-increasing bandwidth needs of Newgrounds.
- Newgrounds started to run into legal issues, mainly with the BBC.
- Newgrounds had been featured in Stuff Magazine and Wired Magazine
- Tom released Pico's School, UFA and Samurai Asshole.
2000
- The Flash Portal was created, allegedly the first of it's kind.
- Tom made two more games, Wasted Sky and the Police Simulator.
- Tom met Shock G of Digital Underground best known for their hit "Humpty Dance", and co-created FDA.
- Tom hired his brother Wade to assist in the upkeep of the site.
- By the end of 2000, Newgrounds had grown to become one of the biggest and most active user communities on the Internet.
2001
- The Chat Room and BBS were created.
- Tom continued to release videos and games, such as Crazy Shuttle and Captain Low-Rez.
- Coolboyman's, a flash author, uses an alternate account, StrawberryClock, to submit a one frame flash movie entitled B on August 15th which would eventually create the Clock Crew and it's spin-offs of flash groups.
2002
- The Newgrounds servers were not upgraded due to financial problems.
- Tom, along with Dan Paladin, created Alien Hominid
- James, an old friend of Tom, cleaned up and optimised the PHP backend of Newgrounds.
- Tom released three new games: Domo-Kun's Angry Smashfest, Chainsaw the Children and Sack Smash 2003.
2003
- Newgrounds' bandwidth costs were over $10,000 a month.
- The Audio Portal was created.
- The site's layout was redesigned to what it is today.
- Tom starts work on a console version of Alien Hominid.
- The Flash Portal reached 50,000 submissions.
- The Lock Legion make their debut.
2004
- Gary Brolsma submitted his soon-to-be-famous Numa Numa Dance to the Flash Portal.
- Tom and artist Dan Paladin (Synj) released the console version Alien Hominid with the developer The Behemoth and the publisher O3 Entertainment.
- Locally infamous and somewhat revered Josh Bend (founder of Retrogade) submits a flash game called Oklahoma City Escapades to the Flash Portal. It garners attention from Oklahoma news and is featured on News Broadcasts internationally as a travesty in insensitive internet gaming.
- Adam Fulton (AKA Livecorpse), a very popular user in the Newgrounds community, and author of 100 flash movies, committed suicide after a three-day manhunt from the police.
- The Star Syndicate make their debut, soon followed by their flash movies the Dailytoons.
- A late Jeff Weise submitted his disturbing flash movie entitled, Target Pratice
- Tom Fulp's character "Pico" was featrued in a short animation called "Pico's Unloaded" created by animator Mindchamber. This animation was later featured on the Knight Entertainment DVD release of Dr. Shroud, another popular Newgrounds flash animation series.
2005
- Tom Fulp's Alien Hominid was nominated in the 2005 Independent Games Festival (IGF), and went on to receive three awards, though not the grand prize which went to Edmund McMillen (an artist Tom Fulp is a big fan of and helps promote) for his game Gish.
- Tom co-hosted Attack of the Show from July 5th-8th.
- The Behemoth premiered its new game (using the working title Ye Olde Side-Scroller or simply The Behemoth's New Game) at July's Comic-Con.
- Tom finally released his newest Flash game in a long time, entitled Dad 'n Me.
- The Glock Group makes their debut.
- Alien Hominid's popularity continues to soar on the platform console, with Zoo Digital releasing Alien Hominid for the GBA console of Alien Hominid and new content for the Xbox version
- A user by the name of vozz- achieved the most Turd of the Week awards ever in the history of Newgrounds
- The_Star_Syndicate, an account held in collective by the Star Syndicate group, becomes the highest submitting account on Newgrounds, overtaking the previous highest submitter, PriKedELiK, who held the position with 150 flash movies. The Star Syndicate currently has circa 200.
Groups, crews and rivalries
Since the beginning of Newgrounds, many crews and groups were formed by various Flash artists to submit their work to the site. The quality of movies or games released by these groups vastly differs, depending on the people working on them. While many users find these clubs to cause spam, on occasion they are known for submitting great content to the site.
There are currently 5 well known flash groups on Newgrounds.
Most of these groups will have a set day, on which they will submit a large amount of movies to the Newgrounds portal. The Clock Crew has this every year, an anniversary of sorts, on August 15th, known as "Clock day". On this day, a plethora of users submit movies featuring Clocks. The same goes for the Lock Legion, except their day is known as Lock Day and is held on the 26th of May.
The Star Syndicate also have a day dedicated to themselves, although this is not held annually. Rather, this Daily Day is held after the current season of Daily2oons (A series of cartoons submitted daily to the portal by The_Star_Syndicate account containing flash by various authors) has ended.
The Glock Group was founded on the 6th July, 2005. The four leaders were Pineapple Glock, Raspberry Glock, Golden Glock and Mushroom Glock, all former Clocks and Locks. The GG originated on an Invisionfree board, but after a while, it got its own site, and eventually its own ___domain name which is Glock Group. The first glock submission was "GG - Angry", which featured and was made by Raspberry Glock and Mushroom Glock. The day "GG - Angry" passed, July 18th, is now considered by the Glocks to be "Glock Day", the equivilant of the Clock Crew's "Clock Day".
With the success of these groups, others were also inspired to create new and better crews of their own. While they started out ok, these new crews just couldn’t keep up with the popularity of the current ones, and thus they were forgotten by the Newgrounds community. Below is a list of these failed groups:
- Bot Brigade
- Block Band
- Compass Crew
- Jew Jihad
- Noob Division
- Paper Clip Posse
- Spade Squadron
- Spam Club
- Sock Squad
- Rock Regatta
- Rock Regiment
Newgrounds Originals
Tom Fulp has submitted several movies and games to Newgrounds. These are referred to as Newgrounds Originals.
His work includes:
Collaborations
Another popular activity on Newgrounds is the collab—various animators, artists and programmers collaborating on a single movie or game. It began with group works by the Clock Crew and flourished when the Newgrounds Time Trials sparked a more general interest among authors. Collaborations are a great way for artists to work together and get to know eachother. They are also a great way for up-and-coming artists to get in the spotlight with the bigshots.
Some examples are: