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Newgrounds

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File:Tomeatingcheese.jpg
Tom Fulp, creator of Newgrounds

Newgrounds is a website that hosts Macromedia Flash animations and games. It was created and is currently owned by Tom Fulp, assisted by his brother Wade Fulp. This site could well have been the Internet's first Flash portal, allowing its users to submit their own Flash movies, games, and music, and view submissions from other users. Whether or not Newgrounds was indeed the first is difficult to prove. The site now has over 800,000 registered members and over 61,000 submissions.

Newgrounds also allows users to rate and review other users' submissions. 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. Newgrounds also allows for members to review the movies submitted by its authors. Reviews may be responded and abusive reviews are taken care of by a group of moderators (mods for short).

An audio portal may also be found on the site for use by flash artists to put into their flash movies or games, or people who just want to listen to something new. Radiogrounds is an offshoot of Newgrounds, featuring various members of the Newgrounds community DJing.

The BBS (short for Bulletin Board System) is a very popular forum on the site, where users can discuss flash, talk about about politics or anything that is on their mind. Thanks to the moderators, it is kept relatively free of spam.

Newgrounds has also inspired many clubs to be formed such as the Clock Crew, Lock Legion,The Glock Group, etc. While many users find these clubs to cause spam, on occasion they are known for submitting decent content to the site.

On July 6th, 2005, Newgrounds celebrated its ten year anniversary.

Timeline

1991

  • Tom Fulp published the first New Ground fanzine in his parent's basement.

1995

  • Tom Fulp launched his first website, New Ground Remix.

1996

  • Tom attended Drexel University. Unable to access the FTP account for New Ground Remix, he launched New Ground Atomix on his Drexel University webspace. He created the Flash files Cat Dynamics and Beep Me Jesus.

1998

  • Tom moved into an apartment, and regained access to the New Ground Remix FTP account. He 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. To make it easier for visitors to remember his site's URL, Tom decided to register a domain name. Since the domain newground.com was taken, he registered newgrounds.com. Inside Edition eventually lost interest in the story, but this did not discourage Tom. Newgrounds had such high traffic levels at this point that he was forced to move Newgrounds to a new host, and began selling T-shirts to pay the hosting bills.

1999

  • Tom was forced to change servers and web hosts multiple times to meet the ever-increasing bandwidth needs of Newgrounds. He started to place banner ads on the site to pay for the high costs of maintaining the site, which had risen to over $1000 a month. He decided to partner with Tromaville - an online affiliate network - who agreed to host Newgrounds for part of the advertising revenue.
  • Newgrounds started to run into legal issues, mainly with the BBC.
  • Newgrounds had been featured in Stuff Magazine, Wired Magazine and many other magazines and online news venues.
  • Tom also released Pico, which was acclaimed as the pinnacle of Flash 3 programing. By the end of the year, he had also released the Flash games UFA and Samurai Asshole.

2000

  • Tom added a chat room and message board (commonly known as a BBS).
  • He created the Portal, a page that allowed users to submit Flash movies and games to Newgrounds. However, Tom had to manually select and post submissions. The portal received so many submissions that Tom was unable to view them all. He and his friend Ross Snyder started work on an automated portal system in an attempt to solve the problem. Tom quit his job, and he and Ross dropped out of Drexel. When the automated portal was launched, it became the highlight of Newgrounds.
  • Tom made two more games, Wasted Sky and the Police Simulator.
  • Tom met Shock G, a Newgrounds member of Digitial Underground which were popular back in the early 90's releasing such hits as "Humpty Dance",at a Philadelphia nightclub. They became good friends and co-created FDA.
  • Ross created a new BBS system, and 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

  • Commonly known as the "dot-com bubble burst", 2001 was not a good year for Newgrounds. Tom saw many other Internet entertainment sites go out of business. Advertising revenue at Newgrounds dropped significantly and it began to struggle financially. Ross took on a second job.
  • The site was still updated and Tom continued to release videos and games, such as Crazy Shuttle and Captain Low-Rez.
  • A user by the name of StrawberryClock submitted a one frame flash movie entitled "B" on August 15th which would eventually create the Clock Crew and its spinoffs of flash communities.

2002

  • The Newgrounds servers were not upgraded due to financial problems. Ross was forced to put his job over his position at Newgrounds and moved on. Newgrounds also wasn't growing as fast as it had been the past two years.
  • Tom and Ross decided to go back to Drexel University; Tom succesfully graduated, receiving a BS in Information Systems. Despite full-time education taking up a large amount of his time, he managed to create Alien Hominid, still considered his most advanced game.
  • James, an old friend of Tom, cleaned up and optimised the PHP backend of Newgrounds - providing Newgrounds with a significant performance increase.
  • The Newgrounds servers were upgraded.
  • Tom released three new games: Domo-Kun's Angry Smashfest, Chainsaw the Children and Sack Smash 2003. Meanwhile the automated portal celebrated reaching 50,000 submissions.

2003

  • Tromaville released Newgrounds from their contract. Tom gained full control over the New York City servers, which he moved to Philadelphia. By this point, Newgrounds' bandwidth costs were over $10,000 a month.
  • Tom launched the Audio Portal which allowed users to submit their music and sound effects to Newgrounds. The site's layout was also redesigned.
  • Tom starts work on a console version of Alien Hominid. The work involved with programming the game prevented him from submitting any more movies or games, but the Newgrounds community continued to submit Flash works.
  • The flash portal reached 100,000 submissions during this time, but while submission 50,000 still exists on the portal, submission 100,000 was blammed from the portal with a 1.43/5.00 at the time of its demise.
  • The Lock Legion was formed by a user called "StrawberryLock." It was made to annoy the Clock Crew.

2004

  • Tom and artist Dan Paladin (Synj) released the console version of their game 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 newgrounds.com portal. It garners attention from Oklahoma news and is featured on News Broadcasts internationally as a travesty in insensitive internet gaming.
  • A group of flash artists, known as "The Star Syndicate" makes its debut on Newgrounds. This groups daily flash submissions known as "DailyToons" has been a part of Newgrounds history as not only the largest flash series on Newgrounds, but also as the "greatest feared" submissions ever submitted. The Dailytoons series ended on its 100th episode (Later they began again in 2005 as "Daily2oons". It is unknown however, how long the second installment will run.) Also on that day, each member of the Star Syndicate submitted individual movies bearing their DailyToon name. This finale was also the largest flash finale in the history of Newgrounds. The Star Syndicate continues to create flash movies for Newgrounds to this day.
  • A late Jeff Wiese submitted his disturbing flash movie entitled, "Target Pratice"

2005

Newgrounds originals

Tom Fulp has submitted several movies and games to Newgrounds. These are referred to as Newgrounds Originals.

His work includes:

Groups, crews and rivalries

Many groups of people have formed in the Newgrounds community, including the Blam Club, the Clock Crew and its spinoffs: the Lock Legion, "The Star Syndicate," and The Glock Group being most prominent. The quality of movies or games released by these groups vastly differs, depending on the people working on them.

Another popular activity on Newgrounds is the "collab" - various animators, artists and programmers collaborating on a single movie or game.

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