Newgrounds dropped “Flash”,
then kept Flash alive

The December 1998 page still calls itself New Ground Atomix, in the browser title and in its welcome line: home of hits such as Assassin, Club a Seal, Telebubby Fun Land, and more! The address is already newgrounds.com. Under the welcome sits a news column written in the first person. It mixes game updates with merchandise, music, a new BBS and press news. Furby has a prominent index on Yahoo!, so I added a new way to kill him.

The domain came from a phone call. In late September 1998 Inside Edition called Tom Fulp about his game Assassin, and he wanted an address viewers could remember from a TV screen. He chose “Newgrounds”, plural, merged his old sites under it and paid $33 a month to host it himself. Inside Edition never called back.^[1]

That Flash movie, atom.swf, was 640 × 480 pixels. It is left out of our still: the welcome and the Now Playing list sit at left, and at right the prompt If you can't see the above display, get Shockwave! The money came from the side column: Buy NG Music, Advertising and T-Shirts. If you saw someone wearing one, the October news asked you to give them a low-five to show your respect!

The 1999 capture is the homepage’s plain version for visitors without Shockwave, and it opens with a history lesson. The New Ground name dates back to 1992, and New Ground has existed on the web since '95. Under it the attractions get one paragraph each, with a picture: Club a Seal, Assassin, Cat Dynamics and Beep me, Jesus!

The name is older than the website. New Ground was a fanzine about the Neo Geo console, “Neo” standing for new and “Geo” for ground. Fulp published it from his parents’ basement in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, for about 100 members of a club on Prodigy. He was 13.^[1]

The first website, New Ground Remix, nearly stalled because of a better connection. At Drexel University Fulp had a network line in the dorm instead of a modem, and the Remix host’s FTP server refused outside addresses. He could no longer update his own site. So New Ground Atomix started on his Drexel webspace, and for a while there were two separate New Ground sites.^[1]

1999 was also the year of Pico’s School, made in Flash 3. Fulp later put “programming” in quotes when he wrote about it, because Flash 3 didn't even support variables; he built a workaround to keep track of the game.^[1]

By June 2000 the browser title is Newgrounds - The Problems of the Future, Today!, a slogan that also appears in our 2002 to 2006 browser titles. The black page now carries news from other people’s sites. Fulp’s own note at the top, dated June 19, explains why. There are over 900 movies in The Portal, and the good ones need a better form of publicity and categorization.

That Portal was no longer the 1998 link to random mini-sites. On April 6, 2000, an automated version opened: artists could publish their own games and animations without Fulp posting each one by hand. Fulp calls it the first Flash site of its kind, and he built it with his friend Ross.^[1]

The 2001 capture is the page’s main frame, a column of top-five lists, a vote box and long news posts. A banner near the bottom of the screen says BUY A NEWGROUNDS SHIRT! ONLY $16.99, and a casino ad sits in the top corner.

The June 2002 homepage shows a cartoon tank above a pixel wordmark, the second of six logo eras in this story, after the 1999 wordmark. Below it the page is a dense catalogue of featured games and movies, two columns of small pictures with a one-line pitch each.

On August 7, 2002, Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin uploaded Alien Hominid, a shooter about a little yellow alien whose UFO crash-lands.^[2] By June 2003 the homepage poll asks Would you rather see Alien Hominid on the XBOX, or the PS2?

The question was real. On April 1, 2003, Fulp, Paladin and colleagues of Paladin’s in San Diego formed The Behemoth to make a console version, and Fulp’s history adds that This was no April Fools joke. The same month, a new multi-author system let Fulp and Paladin share the game’s credit on the site for the first time.^[1]

In June 2004 the tank sits beside the wordmark over an orange city skyline, and the page has turned grey with framed panels. The top box asks for help with money: Help ween Newgrounds off pop-up ads by taking this on-line poll! The left column lists six NG Features, starting with Dating Sims.

Scroll down to June 9 and Fulp has posted a Copycat Rant. Users thought a Flash portal was a common idea every site shared, so he wrote the history down. Further down, in the capture’s code below our still, he explains that the section he once called The Portal was now referred to as the Flash Portal due to the existence of the Audio Portal.

In his June 15 post, Fulp returns to the game from the 2003 poll. Alien Hominid has officially entered "ALPHA" this week, Fulp writes, adding that he is DYING TO GET STARTED on new web games once it ships. The console version reached shops in November 2004.^[1]

The Flash original stayed on Newgrounds. Its game page in April 2004 opens with PLAY THIS GAME!!! and a warning in capitals: THIS IS NOT THE CONSOLE VERSION. The counter under the score reads 71,349 votes, 5,388,356 views.

On April 1, 2005, the whole site turned into Numagrounds, an April Fools’ spoof of Numa Numa Dance, the video that had premiered on Newgrounds the previous December. None of our captures is from that day. Even Fulp’s own history admits, I need to dig up a picture of our header.^[1]

The June 2005 page has a box headed Behemoth News: Alien Hominid is now available for PS2 & XBOX in Europe, Australia and NZ! Above it, the site pays its audience. Not a Flash author? You can win $100 just by voting on submissions!

By June 2006 the logo is redrawn, and under the wordmark the header carries a new slogan: Everything, By Everyone. The browser title still says The Problems Of The Future, Today! The menu under the header is a row of orange buttons, and the first one says Flash Portal.

A redesign two years in the making launched on July 16, 2007, with a streamlined layout, faster loading and user pages instead of profiles.^[1] The September 2007 capture shows the result: dark framed panels for site news and featured movies under the tank header, and a pink bar that runs Flash Portal, Audio Portal, Games, Toons. The browser title now ends with the new slogan, Everything, By Everyone.

The bottom of the page is below our screenshot, but the code keeps it. The footer line reads Your #1 online entertainment community. All your base are belong to us. The sentence All your base are belong to us. is in the footer code of every capture we selected from 2007 to 2016, though the line before it changes in 2012.

Also below our still, the code holds a news post that announces winners of the monthly voting prizes and ends with a date. Next up is Madness Day on September 22nd. It was the first one, and it became a yearly tradition.^[1] The login box shows Checking login status…, and its code includes a button labeled Jack In! >.

The Alien Hominid page from January 2007 is in the older orange layout, and its view count has almost tripled since 2004: 237,769 votes, 15,143,062 views. Under it, a line for visitors who are not logged in: If you log in to vote, you could win $100 !

2008 and 2009 keep the homepage’s frame. The 2009 capture is from June, so it misses the April Fool.

On April 1, 2009, Newgrounds announced a deal with the Chinese government and wrote we've skinned the site in honor of this momentous agreement.^[3] In May Fulp confirmed it had been a joke.^[4] That June the site opened a third portal, for art.^[1]

In October 2010 the orange bar has grown to Flash Portal, Audio Portal, Art, Games, Movies, Collections, Series, Forums and Store. A large promotion for a zombie game called Road of the Dead takes the top of the page. In the left column a To-Do List has four lines: Follow us on Twitter, Become a fan on Facebook, Earn some Medals and Try out Flash Ads.

In March 2011 the bar starts Flash Portal, Audio Portal, Art. It is our last selected homepage capture with the word Flash in the menu.

The March 2012 homepage is a different site. Large thumbnails replace the text lists, artwork fills both sides of the page, and the menu reads Games, Movies, Audio, Art, Channels, Community, Shop NG. The redesign went live on February 7, 2012, and Fulp’s announcement put the reason first on its list.^[5]

The artwork around the page is a skin drawn by an artist on the site, and a Wall Artist link above the menu leads to them.^[5] In the code the old word survives: the collection pictures are files named flash_580821_medium and flash_471838_medium. The 2017 page still uses the same naming.

The rest of 2012 followed the announcement. In September a Supporter upgrade offered a year without ads for $25.^[1] In October the site accepted HTML5 games. The first, Dual Custody, didn't work in Firefox and IE during its first weekend of release and got downvoted a bunch, because the servers sent the wrong MIME type for its .ogg and .m4a sound files.^[6]

Alien Hominid’s page, captured in January 2013, sits in the new layout with a player window, Credits & Info and 20,209,666 Views. Its code still carries a message for visitors without the plug-in: You do not appear to have Adobe Flash installed.

From 2013 to 2016 the frame stays put and the art around it changes. The 2013 page has a compact tank beside a taller wordmark. In March 2014 a small banner in the top corner shows a running figure and the words KEEP 'EM RUNNING over SUPPORT NG, and the code adds a Be a Supporter! image above the featured movies.

September 2015 puts a game ad at the top of the page: Castle Crashers Remastered, Available now on Xbox One! The skin around it is a pair of giant painted eyes. June 2016 swaps them for character art in yellow-brown and pink-purple tones. Each of these pages ends, below our screenshots, with © Copyright 1995- and the year, and with the All your base line. 2016 is the last capture that has it.

In June 2017 a bar above the featured game thanks a reader by name as our latest supporter! and adds a running count: We're 15 people from our target today. Why don't you be one of them? The same bar quotes the price: tons of perks for just $2.99. The menu has a new word in it, Portal, between Art and Community.

By our June 2018 capture, the header wordmark has no tank. The new wordmark is flat, with New in an orange-to-red gradient, and the menu runs Movies, Games, Audio, Art, Portal, Community, Your Feed. The 2019 page’s code includes a Supporter promotion with both prices: Just $2.99 per month or $25 per year. The yearly price matches the 2012 one.

Two months after the June 2019 capture, on August 23, 2019, Fulp announced Ruffle, a Flash emulator written in Rust that runs in the browser. It was meant to be a surprise. We were gonna surprise everyone this fall by suddenly supporting classic content here on NG but it leaked early and the cat is out of the bag.^[7]

The February 2020 homepage opens with a letter instead of a banner. To start this decade right, we believe Newgrounds should be ad-free for EVERYONE. Ads were off on content rated E to M that month, and the letter counts down: We need 238 people to reach our goal of 3,100 active supporters.

On November 1, 2020, a rhythm game called Friday Night Funkin’ was uploaded to the site.^[9] Ten weeks later, on January 12, 2021, Fulp wrote Today is the “true” End of Flash day, where Flash no longer works in browsers. He moved more old games to Ruffle and set up a crew of users to test them.^[8]

Then the rhythm game took the site down. Week 7 of Friday Night Funkin’ launched on Newgrounds on Sunday, April 18, 2021, and the servers weren’t able to handle the millions of people all trying to load it at the same time, on top of DDoS attacks. The game was switched off for a while as capacity went up. In a Thursday update to his post on April 22, Fulp reported that the day before, the game had 1.2 million plays, a new single day record for anything on the site. The site skin that week, the Tankmen, was by MD00dles.^[10]

The June 2021 capture has a blue skin and a new line under the menu: Our goal is for Newgrounds to be ad free for everyone! One of the featured movies in its code is a parody called NEWGROUNDS ON FRIDAY NIGHT FUNKIN.

The February 2022 game page for Alien Hominid has a black player window and a new author comment: This web version was made with Flash and is currently running via in-browser Flash emulation thanks to Ruffle. It's not 100% perfect yet so you'll notice the music stops and you can't see your lives at the moment. The same note is there in January 2026.^[2] Higher up, the 2022 code still holds an older notice: Many browsers are beginning to disable or hide the Adobe Flash plugin, in preparation for its end-of-life in December 2020.

Our June 2022 homepage capture has a collection lower on the page than our screenshot reaches. Its code describes it in one line: Flash Forward 2022, Our second year of new Flash games, after the Death of Flash. The 2022, 2025 and 2026 homepage code also gives Friday Night Funkin’ the hover description The coolest rhythm game on this website.

The June 2023 supporter bar names a new supporter, says We need you on the team, too. and offers tons of perks for just $2.99!. The 2024 page lists a game called Heroes of Pico's School; its code describes it as a Soko-ban puzzler with Pico and friends. The 2025 code has a later collection, Flash Forward 2025: New Flash games, five years after the Death of Flash. And in the 2025 screenshot, a list of top games includes Alien Hominid, by DanPaladin.

The 2025 and 2026 captures share the same Treasure Hunt banner, while the movies and games around it differ, so the banner is not a sign that the page froze. The menu in 2026 is the 2018 one: Movies, Games, Audio, Art, Portal, Community, Your Feed.

1998 · Atomix2026 · Newgrounds

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In 1998 the code offered Get Shockwave Flash! as fallback text, with a link to Macromedia. Browsers no longer run Flash, and the January 2026 Alien Hominid page says the original 2002 game runs through Ruffle in the browser. The 1998 list ended with The Portal (new!), a link to random mini-sites. In our June 2026 homepage capture, Portal is the fifth word in the menu.