I remember playing a crap web game in college, kinda like gunslinger, where you try to shoot people who turn around with a gun (and not those without). When I graduated college, Ian--one of my good friends at work--ended up being one of those guys in the game! Turns out that game I was playing was built by Tom Fulp, and he was using his friends (like Ian) as characters in his games pre-Newgrounds. All that messing around with crap games on the internet paid off. He had started Newgrounds while in college, and had quit to do it.
Met Tom once, and he was a cool guy, but he didn't believe in the stuff that they taught in CS. He had a long rant about how learning string diff algorithms were useless. Anyway, it turns out later on, he went back to college to finish his degree. When his classmate(s) found out who he was, this one kid was so excited to sit next to him. "Do you know who he is?!" he would exclaim to his professor, to Tom's embarrassment. I wonder if he had to do string diff algos when he went back to finish college.
I worked at bigcorp for half a decade before all of the LLM stuff and there was exactly one time I really had to give a shit about algorithmic complexity in that entire tenure. Obviously some developers needed to care more than others, but the vast, vast majority of work and roles just didn’t really need to care about this. 9 times out of 10 you’re using the off the shelf library that already has the optimized bubble sort of whatever for your job
Working at bigcorp for 14 years so far and I struggle to think of a single day where I didn't need to consider algorithmic complexity or efficiency. Do you not write code that fetches things from a database? Do you not need to make tradeoffs between how much data you fetch at once, which fields you load, which things you cache, whether your query joins on the db or materializes things separately, whether you lazy or eager load, whether you are doing a O(1) or O(n^2) lookup and the tradeoffs, whether you can use a db index or not, memory/latency/compute/storage tradeoffs, etc? I feel like in even a simple bigcorp SAAS you need to consider this stuff daily.
Unless you are dealing with data at true scale, and not many people are, often the imperfections are hidden because they run fast, even if they are quadratic. I'm more referring to being actually forced to sit down and write out your own algorithm in a novel way.
Yes, during my BigCorp tenure I had to think about complexity all the time, but 99 times out of 100 there was an off the shelf tool available for my specific data structure and I didn't have to think about the algorithm at all beyond "oh there's a library that solves this for my specific data structure, and it's O(N)log n that will be fast enough". Whereas so much attention in interviewing traditionally was based on these "write a bubble sort algorithm from scratch" type questions which your average engineer basically never has to do on the job unless they are operating in a very high performance/scaling type of role.
How often you have to take algorithmic complexity into account depends on what level of the stack you're at, but even at the application level, I think understanding algorithmic complexity is still important.
I was working at Company X around 2013, and we had a Rails ecommerce site. Trivial in the algorithmic sense. Had a contractor that pushed a change that somehow made everything crawl. When we did profiling together, it turned out he had written an O(n^2) algorithm when looking up country codes or something. Sometimes, there's no off-the-shelf library, and it's the minimum a dev should know not to do.
I'm not saying it should be a maniacal focus, but it should be taken into account. Of course, it's with judgement. We get shittier and shittier software if it's not taken into account at all.
>I worked at bigcorp for half a decade before all of the LLM stuff and there was exactly one time I really had to give a shit about algorithmic complexity in that entire tenure.
Conversely, I've got a PhD in math, and all my tenure (whether it was bigcorp - Google, etc - or smallcorp) was about algorithms and performance where off-the-shelf library does not exist, and you can't throw compute at the problem to do it the dumb way.
I don't know man. Being able to reason about DS&A was pretty useful before the advent of ML Code Generation. If only to pass the interviews at Google/Facebook (when they were in their prime circa 2004-2016).
Also, didn't the parent comment say he went back to college?
It's cool to see how far Ruffle has come in making flash games playable without flash. Was able to go check out a flash game I uploaded 15 years ago on here, and it's completely playable now, when I just assumed it was gone forever. There's so much content on Newgrounds and similar sites that isn't lost to time because of it, makes me want to go spend a few hours reliving the olden days.
A Ruffle anecdote: I know websites ship Ruffle, but I've also had the Firefox extension installed for some old sites that do not. I recently had to disable it because it made Twitch claim that my browser is too old to use their website. I'm assuming they check for Flash support, and somehow that trumps everything else they use to identify the browser version. Pretty pathetic, honestly.
Amazing. Literally the opposite of what you're supposed to do, which is detect individual feature support and upgrade the experience when possible, while gracefully degrading as much as possible when features aren't present.
My bank does this, too. They also only say that the browser has "outdated components" without bothering to tell you what particular thing offended it. Maybe it's some library they both use that doesn't return the details?
I agree, hilarious check. Someone realized that the set of browsers you probably don’t want to support today, and the Flash supporting browsers … the Venn diagram is actually a circle
I have a Twitch account that I can't log into due. They'll send me an e-mail with my username in it but won't send me the password reset e-mail. Their support will acknowledge that I clearly have access to the inbox and will refuse to help or do anything for me to recover my account. They are beyond worthless.
At least you can still use the chat from an IRC client and view streams in mpv. If they ruin those aspects I'll probably quit going there. I did also stream on there a bit in the past, but didn't get too attached or locked in, so mostly I care about the viewer experience still.
Haha, nice to see this pop back up. I used to live on this site, making Flash games, chatting on the forums, and as a member of the Clock Crew. Some of my games were fairly popular at the time, including Proximity and some Clock Crew themed games.
I also made (with Rob as the artist) the first commissioned game for what would eventually be the really popular Armor Games site. When he got started he was wanting to do LOTR themed games and was calling his site Games of Gondor, but he didn't stick with it long probably because of legal reasons. It was called Save The Ring!
Nitrome kicked ass! It had such a unified vision for the universe of its games. You could tell they were all conceived with great care and they felt connected to each other. It's nice to see they're looking the same and still alive and kicking [1].
I was surprised to find Miniclip is still kicking around, hiring developers half an hour away from where I live. Was really tempted to send my CV but sadly they seemed to pivoted to peddling mtx filled slop nowadays.
I was a very active troll on the Games of Gondor forums and subsequently a moderator on the Armor Games forums back in my preteens, high school days. I also uploaded a number of crappy games to New Grounds and participated in a bunch of Halloween, Christmas, or just for sake-of-it collabs.
I feel so very fortunate to have had that community and experience; I can't imagine making analogous connections like that on today's internet. Tom Fulp, Dan McNeely, and other friends were my childhood idols!
Almost brings a tear to my eye to see they still have all the games and stupid Flash animations I submitted as a middle schooler, hacking around with his friends going on 25 years ago, just hoping not to get “blammed”. I’m sure these days kids are doing the same in Roblox or Minecraft or whatever - maybe it’s the same, but it feels so much more commercial than the heyday of Newgrounds. A special time to have been online for sure.
Me to I’m too embarrassed to post my username here. But I made so many little animations and games based on my dragonball z obsession. I’m sure instead of a Wacom and windows pc a new generation is doing this with a iPad and pen.
I remember spending so many hours playing little flash games on Newgrounds and other sites like it in lower secondary school during the breaks. Running up to the library room where the computers where, to get the most amount of computer time squeezed into the short and long breaks.
For a while, my class teacher had me banned from using the computers because she said I shouldn’t use every break to just run to the computers. Maybe she was right that it wasn’t completely healthy. But it’s not like I was alone in running to them, my friends did too, and even though I may have been particularly excited to use the computers I still did things together with my friends both in front of those computers and other socialising with them after school etc.
I remember a specific user I used to chat with on AIM and some of his stuff I remember laughing at doesn't exist anymore, presumably copyright claimed.
yeah I bought it for Ps3 way back in the day. mindblowing seeing that on PSN when some 6 years prior I was playing it in the middle school computer lab.
Newgrounds forums is where I first learned how to code. My early attempts at Flash games were so basic, but in such an endearing way. Such a good community surrounding the Flash games scene. I ran FreelanceFlashGames, if any game developers on here remember the site. Cool to see this surfacing on Hacker News.
I learned how to “code” from Wario Ware DIY, a Nintendo DS game where you could build your own minigames. I would have been about 13 at the time.
I remember being absolutely stumped trying to use the game maker at first. But I followed in-game tutorials, and it finally clicked how it worked. It was mostly just creating sprites and setting logic on them, i.e. “if you tap this sprite, set a flag”, “if this sprite collides with another, do Y”, etc
But I do credit it with first opening my mind to the fun and possibility of making computers do things.
Excellent game, just recently started playing touch for old times' sake!
I wonder if Mario Maker served similarly for the next cohort. Or even if Tears of the Kingdom, with such a flexible play style, encourages a similar spirit.
I remember FreelanceFlashGames - used to work for Flashgamelicense in the early days as a game tester. Your book was a great help in getting enough money in sponsorships to pay for a couple of nice vacations, so belated thanks!
Hey, no problem! Hearing that made my day. Glad you enjoyed the book. Flash Game License was really groundbreaking in providing a space for developers and sponsors to come together. A great way to get early feedback on games too!
My sexual awakening was centered around browsing the adult section of Newgrounds when I was way too young. 25 years later and I’m still a bit messed up in that regard, lol
I never got to actually be on newgrounds, when I was 8 to 14 years old I didn't understand much english so I was always playing newgrounds games but off sites, it's only later that I understood that most of it was from the same community!
So fun to see my music (created when I was 15 years old) is still sitting there! Sadly though my flash animations (that were 'blammed'[0] almost immediately) aren't there, which I wish I could find somehow.
Nice to see Newgrounds is still alive and more or less unchanged since its early days. With so many of the creative spaces online becoming highly censored hellholes, having a more laissez-faire platform is a breath of fresh air.
One of the worst cultural developments of this century has been creative people becoming censorship-hungry prudes. There is a certain romanticism about being anti-establishment, but then they became the establishment and couldn’t figure out what to do next.
I think you're blaming the wrong people. Most of the censorship I've seen is coming from ad funded platforms wanting to please corporations. Independent artists create all kinds of offensive content.
Unless you mean that there is less slurs and jokes against minorities, which is an improvement tbh.
No doubt the platforms are a problem too, but I was referring to the creatives themselves. Just a few examples I can remember.
In 2020 dozens of Hachette employees walked out over the publisher’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir. Hachette cancelled the book.
Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.
Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.
John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.
Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.
The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.
I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
> Unless you mean that there is less slurs and jokes against minorities, which is an improvement tbh.
Censorship is bad unless I agree with it. Then it’s good. Stunning levels of thought and reason.
Bill Lawrence removed episodes because he and the cast hated that for years after they'd see people at halloween dressing as the characters in blackface, and realised that people were taking the wrong message from the episodes they'd made which were meant to mock the idea of people thinking it was OK to do blackface.
That isn't self-censorship, it's accepting that your work didn't read the way you wanted it to and deciding it's not worth having it out there under your name any more.
Freedom of speech also includes the freedom not to speak, and people should be allowed to say "I don't like this work of mine any more, I'm not continuing to publish it". If you advocate for enforced speech, you are the censor, just using a different tool.
> That isn't self-censorship, it's accepting that your work didn't read the way you wanted it to and deciding it's not worth having it out there under your name any more.
You are confused about the definition of the word censor:
> [to prevent part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/censor)
I understand Lawrence has reasons for his calls for censorship. All censorious people have reasons for their demands. They are still calls for censorship. Lawrence is free to not speak. He's even free to demand that media be censored. No one has argued otherwise.
I'm aware of the definition of censorship, but the context is you saying:
> One of the worst cultural developments of this century has been creative people becoming censorship-hungry prudes.
This is not the same as a dictionary definition of censorship generally.
Presenting people changing their views over time as they learn as some evidence of some new trend of "censorship-hungry prudes" is silly. It's hysteria and a false narrative trying to paint something normal and healthy as equivalent to something dangerous.
The much bigger media preservation issue is actually represented by Scrubs: the fact that all the streaming services now have the show with all the music cut out and replaced with generic royalty-free stuff because the licenses ran out.
TV self-censored for years. Elvis was unfit for family viewing. Punks wouldn’t share stages with racists and ejected National Front supporters from gigs. Rock against Racism was founded partly in response to Eric Clapton’s pro-Enoch Powell racist remarks. Dead Kennedeys were not exactly coy about where they drew the line.
If you want medical analogies for COVID, AIDS disinformation is perfect. ACT UP and similar AIDS movements would have laughed you out of creative spaces for bringing misinformation about how AIDS was spread.
If you have ChatGPT tokens going spare, you can ask it for a balanced view of historical artistic deplatforming and self-censoring. I asked mine and, in classic one-liner machine-slop dunk, it said…
“The argument sounds like it is being made by someone under 40 who believes they’re living through a unique historical decline but refuses to read a book, or someone over 40 who missed the world around them. Ask them which they are.”
Elvis wasn't the one calling for censorship. It was religious viewers - the audience.
I'm not denying that there were examples of creatives - like punks - who called for censorship. I'm describing a massive shift in scale and scope.
I did as you suggested because it's important to have a broad and balanced view of the issues. I used the query "Do you believe the scale and scope of creatives calling for censorship is worse, better, or the same today as it was 50 years ago? Provide a detailed response but summarise with one sentence at the end." I used Sol 5.6 Extra High (I'm deliberately avoiding Sol 6 right now due to some issues with hallucinations). I have a system prompt which emphasises accuracy and citations over speed.
I won't paste the entire passage (Hacker News bans and/or rate limits accounts which do that), but I will paste the summary. Note that I've read the analysis in full, and while I am more informed now, it has not changed my opinion.
> "On the specific question of creatives themselves calling for lawful expression to be suppressed, removed or deplatformed, I think the evidence points to it being broader in scope and probably more common today than 50 years ago, although formal government censorship was in some respects more coercive then."
Feel free to ask your research model the same question. I would encourage you to use a better paid model with careful system prompt, direction, and effort. Your model sounds like a petulant teenager.
““use a better paid model” as an argument from authority is magnificent. We’ve somehow reinvented “my dad can beat up your dad,” except our dads are inference-time budgets”.
So there’s that.
Getting back to human responses; it’s hard to argue your robot’s conclusion when it only got to a weak “probably” while comparing the communication environments of 1980’s (no social media) and 2026 (very much social media). Lots more people with lots bigger platforms dealing with lots more voices on what should/shouldn’t be tolerated -> perceived increase in volume of censorship by both audience and other creatives (themselves taking role of both audience and performer playing to their own audience)
Elvis may not have been calling to censor himself, but the hosts and producers (themselves creatives) followed the demands of the audience - surely at least a somewhat close analogy to creatives amplifying the voices of their audiences today?
To get a bit better than your model’s “probably”, maybe we should shoot for specifics. If we agree there was a “dark past” where government and religious pressure created artistic censorship to comparable levels to today, and if I concede to move the argument forward that we’re in “historical decline” now. Where specifically do you put the beginning and end of the “golden age”?
The dark past could of course overlap with the start of the subsequent decline, creating not a golden age but a shit age, centered maybe on the late 80s.
It seems entirely disingenuous to tell me to investigate this in earnest and ask ChatGPT for answers, then dismiss it when it didn't give you the answer you wanted. I gave you the model, the effort level, the query, and the summary, which you could use to confirm what I write. I note that you haven't tested this yourself - ostensibly because you know it will return something similar. Further, you either didn't read my comments or are attempting to straw man them, because I have not stated nor argued that religious and government censorship is equivalent today. I also find the implication in your final question absurd. There is no way to place chronological boxes around cultural change. They are not binary, and I do not believe you think they are.
Your comment is dishonesty wrapped in condescension, and it's clear that you never intended to have any kind of earnest discussion here.
Of all the replies I was expecting from you, this wasn’t on my betting slip.
There’s no condescension here; you had one key thesis I objected to (and, incidentally, were the first to invoke a robot war!)
> I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
My argument is - it did “used to be this way”. Your proxy, as best as I can tell, agreed.
> formal government censorship was in some respects more coercive then.
And your courageous avatar made a weak (e.g. the word probably, not provably and “I think” not “I showed”) supportive claim (I cannot see the reams of research behind the conclusion).
> I think the evidence points to it being broader in scope and probably more common today than 50 years ago
I said, ok, let’s take that at face - where do you feel the transition happend, and posited reasons why the transition may seem stronger (social media).
Now you’re unwilling to argue specifics and off dismissing my sincerity. Adult argument fully abandoned, feelings abound!
So neither of us will learn anything useful today. I’ll never find out specifically when you believe our slippery slope began, and you’ll never explore whether reality matches your thinking. Let’s hope the data centers that powered your race to self-confirmation were running on solar, so at least the environment was spared!
In the hope of rescuing some thread.
> There is no way to place chronological boxes around cultural change.
This is not only demonstrably false, it also turns your initial thesis “it didn’t used to be like this” into a farce. You were the first to claim there was some time boxing we could apply!
It also, candidly, reinforces the first conclusion robo-me reached. “ someone under 40 who believes they’re living through a unique historical decline but refuses to read a book”. My robot gave me 10,000 examples of books on the study and findings of historians researching the evolution of cultural norms over time. It is very much a thing. I very much believe in it sincerely as a valuable discipline.
If you really want to argue that nobody can say Victorian social norms evolved, and were arguably most harmed by the First World War. Or that the gender and sexual attitudes of the post-second-world-war were pushed to breaking point during a period known as the “swinging sixties”. Or that the introduction of social media and camera phones to the schoolyard caused a dramatic change in kids’ behaviors. Then I think you’re being a special kind of Saturday obstinate.
But if you are actually trying to discuss rather than play-fight, try answering the question - when specifically do you think that the decline began, such that we are no longer living in the rose-tinted era where things “used to be”?
And dude, you can back your claim down or add nuance to it - “creatives censor in a different way in the internet era to how the censored in the TV era” is a defensible claim, I’ll even let you have “the nature of what is censored now has changed”. You’re just not getting away with a demonstrably false “there’s more censorship now”.
In 2020 dozens of Hachette employees walked out over the publisher’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir. Hachette cancelled the book.
Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.
Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.
John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.
Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.
The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.
I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
Time to play some Nuclear Eagle. It's a game where you're a momma eagle feeding your chicks. Except you're giant and feed them people. And people don't like being eaten, so it has some GTA-style escalation.
Spent insane amounts of time on Newgrounds back in the day, still watch some of the classics (tank men, ultimate showdown, metal gear awesome, etc etc) from time to time. A different internet back then.
I used to play flash games on this site, one of my favorites was "William and Sly" and also "William and Sly 2".
You can still play them now, they ported it away from flash - which still offered experiences that we are just now beginning to match natively in terms of web gaming and video generation.
Maybe just nostalgia talking, but the height of Newgrounds really seemed like a golden age for light gaming. The shift to mobile games has just resulted in a large number of gambling simulators, which I'm sure has been a key reason for the popularity of Kalshi, Polymarket, etc.
I'd say the shift to mobile went through a similar arc into decline as the web, actually.
Newgrounds really was the golden age for web gaming. And, similar to early web, early mobile gaming also started out with nostalgia-worthy charm and heart. You're right that it's been hollowed out, but the same thing happened to web gaming after the Flash era. The social casino era is maybe its 6th reinvention, and its lowest yet.
Now that mobile gaming has been raced to the bottom and consolidated (and thanks to the dual tailwinds of AI making it easy to write code without engines and the web maturing in its 3d+networking capabilities) we're started to see a resurgence of web-based games - it's my full-time job now! Granted we still do rely on mobile apps (as web wrappers) for monetization, but that wall is crumbling rapidly.
Would you share who you're working for? I'm looking for a switch to web game development, I already have some experience with it but I did lost all the hope that the web was still the platform where to play some games
Gambling aside, the median quality of a modern mobile game is worse than what we had on newgrounds.
NG didn't have multiple 500MB downloads, buttons in the wrong place, pointless currencies. More importantly NG artists actually cared. I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.
Software in general is worse than it used to be 20 years ago. My conjecture is that as the software industry got bigger and bigger, the number of people who cared about doing good work stayed the same, which meant a higher percentage of work has been done by people who don't care. But regardless of the cause, quality in our industry is way down.
> I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.
WebAssembly is better compilation target and runtime than Flash ever was. Many languages can compile to WebAssembly.
I think what you want is an authoring tool like Flash. Why not make that tool? Or if you don't want to make it, Rive's a pretty good animation engine. You can make games with it:
Assuming you're not looking at the file sizes involved...
SWF is extremely compact, since it was intended to be used over a dialup connection. Flash worked because the player was preinstalled on the computer.
The newer Ruffle player is a 10MB download in addition to the actual flash file. You get a new freshly downloaded copy of Ruffle from every site that's hosting Flash content.
I have an old phone. I'm on one of the cheapest plans. I ran a speed test with https://speedtest.net and I got 124 megabits per second. That's 15 megabytes per second, 900 megabytes per minute, which is 90x more than YouTube's 1080p video rate of 10 megabytes per minute.
The swf player was definitely smaller, through some miracle — I remember marveling at how quick it was to install it the first time, and I’m pretty sure that’s a big reason Flash became so ubiquitous that you could just blindly assume its presence by 2002 or so - the install was small even for dial-up, and required like one click.
But compared to the average internet user’s connection speed or their consumed bandwidth at this time, 10MB is probably smaller. We just don’t put it in a plugin today because the browser cache can handle that just fine, and because it means the code is more sandboxed, and that if it needs updates, managing that is easy for the game publisher to do.
> Wasn't the main reason that it was really difficult to keep the sandbox secure?
It basically ran JavaScript. It's no harder to sandbox Flash than it's to sandbox any HTML5 website. Arguably much easier because there was no JIT back then. Flash also ran in an enclosed box on a website and had no access to DOM, which greatly lowers attack surface.
That seems a reach to say the popularity of kalshi and polymarket is down to gambling simulators.
Id wager (heh) that it's much more down to a lack of regulation combined with the normalisation of influencer driven get rich quick but pretend it's clever investing that exploded in popularity with crypto and wallstreetbets style influencer investing. Combine that with house prices being where they are and people get risky with investing as their hope outstrips their caution.
I don't think a few rounds of balatro or slotomania leads to that.
The crazy thing is there was a period between Newgrounds games and mobile games: Facebook games. It was so popular at that moment and so insignificant hindsight that we barely remember it.
that's quite a reach. much more obviously, the shift to mobile games has resulted in predatory pay2win "micro"transactions and ads everywhere. the last time I'd tried to find something new to play on the shitter, seemingly every random game I got from the playstore wanted an AAA's worth of $ to unlock features and/or was full of ads. and they weren't even those coomer bait gachas everyone with half a brain knows to avoid.
i dont think its the sites. people always blame the sites. but people became lazy and hungry for dopamine. they arent creating cool stuff anymore but almost get upset or withdrawl if someone else dont shove something 'new and exciting' down their throats
internet is not the only thin that suffers it. TV, music, its the same. Listen to what kids played music ,movies, toys etc. in 60, 70, 80, 90s up to today. you will see very sharp changes, first in how they occupy themselves and then in how they shape society -_- for their kids to go into the next dumbing down cycle.
(yes v cynical and black n white put. easier to word)
It peaked and went on a decline in the period before companies were snatching up sites just to merge their user bases.
Had newgrounds continued into the 2010's, it would've been bought by Google to boost Google Wave / Circles / Plus whatever, and then it would've been actually shutdown.
So its age is actually what helped it survive I suspect.
What a treat to see this pop up here. I used to be obsessed with Madness flash shorts back in the day. Got me into Flash and web tooling in general. A testament to the prime 2000s web.
I remember playing a crap web game in college, kinda like gunslinger, where you try to shoot people who turn around with a gun (and not those without). When I graduated college, Ian--one of my good friends at work--ended up being one of those guys in the game! Turns out that game I was playing was built by Tom Fulp, and he was using his friends (like Ian) as characters in his games pre-Newgrounds. All that messing around with crap games on the internet paid off. He had started Newgrounds while in college, and had quit to do it.
Met Tom once, and he was a cool guy, but he didn't believe in the stuff that they taught in CS. He had a long rant about how learning string diff algorithms were useless. Anyway, it turns out later on, he went back to college to finish his degree. When his classmate(s) found out who he was, this one kid was so excited to sit next to him. "Do you know who he is?!" he would exclaim to his professor, to Tom's embarrassment. I wonder if he had to do string diff algos when he went back to finish college.
I may need some input on fastest string comparison algorithms, for a hobby project...
I suppose he was right, just ~20 years too early...
He did alright, he might have been right 20 years ago too
I worked at bigcorp for half a decade before all of the LLM stuff and there was exactly one time I really had to give a shit about algorithmic complexity in that entire tenure. Obviously some developers needed to care more than others, but the vast, vast majority of work and roles just didn’t really need to care about this. 9 times out of 10 you’re using the off the shelf library that already has the optimized bubble sort of whatever for your job
Working at bigcorp for 14 years so far and I struggle to think of a single day where I didn't need to consider algorithmic complexity or efficiency. Do you not write code that fetches things from a database? Do you not need to make tradeoffs between how much data you fetch at once, which fields you load, which things you cache, whether your query joins on the db or materializes things separately, whether you lazy or eager load, whether you are doing a O(1) or O(n^2) lookup and the tradeoffs, whether you can use a db index or not, memory/latency/compute/storage tradeoffs, etc? I feel like in even a simple bigcorp SAAS you need to consider this stuff daily.
Unless you are dealing with data at true scale, and not many people are, often the imperfections are hidden because they run fast, even if they are quadratic. I'm more referring to being actually forced to sit down and write out your own algorithm in a novel way.
Yes, during my BigCorp tenure I had to think about complexity all the time, but 99 times out of 100 there was an off the shelf tool available for my specific data structure and I didn't have to think about the algorithm at all beyond "oh there's a library that solves this for my specific data structure, and it's O(N)log n that will be fast enough". Whereas so much attention in interviewing traditionally was based on these "write a bubble sort algorithm from scratch" type questions which your average engineer basically never has to do on the job unless they are operating in a very high performance/scaling type of role.
All of that is pretty trivial stuff, not complex algorithms.
How often you have to take algorithmic complexity into account depends on what level of the stack you're at, but even at the application level, I think understanding algorithmic complexity is still important.
I was working at Company X around 2013, and we had a Rails ecommerce site. Trivial in the algorithmic sense. Had a contractor that pushed a change that somehow made everything crawl. When we did profiling together, it turned out he had written an O(n^2) algorithm when looking up country codes or something. Sometimes, there's no off-the-shelf library, and it's the minimum a dev should know not to do.
I'm not saying it should be a maniacal focus, but it should be taken into account. Of course, it's with judgement. We get shittier and shittier software if it's not taken into account at all.
Even doing a webapp it is fairly important, I have seen a lot of horribly optimized DOM tree traversal tank things.
>I worked at bigcorp for half a decade before all of the LLM stuff and there was exactly one time I really had to give a shit about algorithmic complexity in that entire tenure.
Conversely, I've got a PhD in math, and all my tenure (whether it was bigcorp - Google, etc - or smallcorp) was about algorithms and performance where off-the-shelf library does not exist, and you can't throw compute at the problem to do it the dumb way.
To each their own.
I don't know man. Being able to reason about DS&A was pretty useful before the advent of ML Code Generation. If only to pass the interviews at Google/Facebook (when they were in their prime circa 2004-2016).
Also, didn't the parent comment say he went back to college?
was the "crap" web game brain-splatters by any chance?
Hrm, I don't think so with a cursory search on NewGrounds. I can't remember the name.
It's cool to see how far Ruffle has come in making flash games playable without flash. Was able to go check out a flash game I uploaded 15 years ago on here, and it's completely playable now, when I just assumed it was gone forever. There's so much content on Newgrounds and similar sites that isn't lost to time because of it, makes me want to go spend a few hours reliving the olden days.
A Ruffle anecdote: I know websites ship Ruffle, but I've also had the Firefox extension installed for some old sites that do not. I recently had to disable it because it made Twitch claim that my browser is too old to use their website. I'm assuming they check for Flash support, and somehow that trumps everything else they use to identify the browser version. Pretty pathetic, honestly.
Amazing. Literally the opposite of what you're supposed to do, which is detect individual feature support and upgrade the experience when possible, while gracefully degrading as much as possible when features aren't present.
My bank does this, too. They also only say that the browser has "outdated components" without bothering to tell you what particular thing offended it. Maybe it's some library they both use that doesn't return the details?
Also pretty funny if true
I agree, hilarious check. Someone realized that the set of browsers you probably don’t want to support today, and the Flash supporting browsers … the Venn diagram is actually a circle
Twitch is a big category in the enshittification category. They're endlessly user hostile. I want to force management to use their own products
The money people probably just told them "more ads. I don't care how you do it - more ads"
I have a Twitch account that I can't log into due. They'll send me an e-mail with my username in it but won't send me the password reset e-mail. Their support will acknowledge that I clearly have access to the inbox and will refuse to help or do anything for me to recover my account. They are beyond worthless.
At least you can still use the chat from an IRC client and view streams in mpv. If they ruin those aspects I'll probably quit going there. I did also stream on there a bit in the past, but didn't get too attached or locked in, so mostly I care about the viewer experience still.
>you can still use the chat from an IRC client and view streams in mpv
I bet it's only because they forgot they had such a feature. Like RSS feeds on Reddit.
I've been using the ps vita homebrew port of Ruffle for the past few days and really enjoying it
Haha, nice to see this pop back up. I used to live on this site, making Flash games, chatting on the forums, and as a member of the Clock Crew. Some of my games were fairly popular at the time, including Proximity and some Clock Crew themed games.
I also made (with Rob as the artist) the first commissioned game for what would eventually be the really popular Armor Games site. When he got started he was wanting to do LOTR themed games and was calling his site Games of Gondor, but he didn't stick with it long probably because of legal reasons. It was called Save The Ring!
Here's my user profile, same name as I am on here: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/
NG and AG were wonderful sites that made sure I never did all my homework
Also Nitrome! Truly a golden age
Nitrome kicked ass! It had such a unified vision for the universe of its games. You could tell they were all conceived with great care and they felt connected to each other. It's nice to see they're looking the same and still alive and kicking [1].
[1] - https://www.nitrome.com
What a flood of nostalgia.
I wonder if AI could help in reviving these.
With my zero knowledge of flash is it possible to somehow bridge it into modern browsers using web assembly or something?
Not AI, but Flash games have been 'saved' already, if you've still got the .swf:
https://ruffle.rs/
Oh kongregate totally forgot about that
I was surprised to find Miniclip is still kicking around, hiring developers half an hour away from where I live. Was really tempted to send my CV but sadly they seemed to pivoted to peddling mtx filled slop nowadays.
Don’t forget Andkon Arcade (:
Joe Cartoon
I was a very active troll on the Games of Gondor forums and subsequently a moderator on the Armor Games forums back in my preteens, high school days. I also uploaded a number of crappy games to New Grounds and participated in a bunch of Halloween, Christmas, or just for sake-of-it collabs.
I feel so very fortunate to have had that community and experience; I can't imagine making analogous connections like that on today's internet. Tom Fulp, Dan McNeely, and other friends were my childhood idols!
Could you write a longer-form, in-depth origin story of Armor Games and what became of it?
It's certainly a niche but important part of internet history
Almost brings a tear to my eye to see they still have all the games and stupid Flash animations I submitted as a middle schooler, hacking around with his friends going on 25 years ago, just hoping not to get “blammed”. I’m sure these days kids are doing the same in Roblox or Minecraft or whatever - maybe it’s the same, but it feels so much more commercial than the heyday of Newgrounds. A special time to have been online for sure.
Me to I’m too embarrassed to post my username here. But I made so many little animations and games based on my dragonball z obsession. I’m sure instead of a Wacom and windows pc a new generation is doing this with a iPad and pen.
> A community of games, music, and art
And a legendary one at that!
I remember spending so many hours playing little flash games on Newgrounds and other sites like it in lower secondary school during the breaks. Running up to the library room where the computers where, to get the most amount of computer time squeezed into the short and long breaks.
For a while, my class teacher had me banned from using the computers because she said I shouldn’t use every break to just run to the computers. Maybe she was right that it wasn’t completely healthy. But it’s not like I was alone in running to them, my friends did too, and even though I may have been particularly excited to use the computers I still did things together with my friends both in front of those computers and other socialising with them after school etc.
I'm glad that Newgrounds is one of those sites that has kept it's soul all these years.
Even the same old games are still there
I remember a specific user I used to chat with on AIM and some of his stuff I remember laughing at doesn't exist anymore, presumably copyright claimed.
I haven't played Fancy Pants Adventures close to 20 years... what a blast from the past.
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/301341
They made a playstation game eventually - I thought it was really good! More fleshed out and missing a bit of the charm, but not much.
yeah I bought it for Ps3 way back in the day. mindblowing seeing that on PSN when some 6 years prior I was playing it in the middle school computer lab.
Newgrounds forums is where I first learned how to code. My early attempts at Flash games were so basic, but in such an endearing way. Such a good community surrounding the Flash games scene. I ran FreelanceFlashGames, if any game developers on here remember the site. Cool to see this surfacing on Hacker News.
I learned how to “code” from Wario Ware DIY, a Nintendo DS game where you could build your own minigames. I would have been about 13 at the time.
I remember being absolutely stumped trying to use the game maker at first. But I followed in-game tutorials, and it finally clicked how it worked. It was mostly just creating sprites and setting logic on them, i.e. “if you tap this sprite, set a flag”, “if this sprite collides with another, do Y”, etc
But I do credit it with first opening my mind to the fun and possibility of making computers do things.
Excellent game, just recently started playing touch for old times' sake!
I wonder if Mario Maker served similarly for the next cohort. Or even if Tears of the Kingdom, with such a flexible play style, encourages a similar spirit.
I remember FreelanceFlashGames - used to work for Flashgamelicense in the early days as a game tester. Your book was a great help in getting enough money in sponsorships to pay for a couple of nice vacations, so belated thanks!
Hey, no problem! Hearing that made my day. Glad you enjoyed the book. Flash Game License was really groundbreaking in providing a space for developers and sponsors to come together. A great way to get early feedback on games too!
I remember watching Salad Fingers on there and playing tons of idle and tower defence games; good times
Salad fingers.
That was the creepiest thing ever when it came out.
Rusty spoons.
I like it when the red water comes out
I still get a tiny creepout when I recall how he said "grubby tap"
And on fat-pie, where he's still making new salad fingers episodes.
https://fat-pie.com/
Also Weebl and Bob.
For some reason, I sneak 'Magical Trevor' into code as an easter egg / test string when I can (instead of things like 'Foo'/'Bar')
And I am saddened to this day that no one I've worked with professionally has gotten the reference. One day.
Don’t lose hope, this is the kind of thing that pays off eventually, and you may even make a new friend that day :)
Aaah, Tales from the Great War.
My sexual awakening was centered around browsing the adult section of Newgrounds when I was way too young. 25 years later and I’m still a bit messed up in that regard, lol
Hell yeah Pico's School is still up https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/310349
Stuff that I made in 2005 is still there https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/267616
Ruffle seems to have a bug that causes the intro scene to skip ahead if you wait a while.
Ha, it’s still up.
Looking up my user, kind of embarrassing to see comments from 22 years ago asking and giving code advice.
However, it does raise lots of nostalgia for the BBS era.
I never got to actually be on newgrounds, when I was 8 to 14 years old I didn't understand much english so I was always playing newgrounds games but off sites, it's only later that I understood that most of it was from the same community!
So fun to see my music (created when I was 15 years old) is still sitting there! Sadly though my flash animations (that were 'blammed'[0] almost immediately) aren't there, which I wish I could find somehow.
[0] - https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/599831
While the games are where I spent most of my time, like most others I'm sure, I also found one of my favorite pieces of music on Newgrounds.
https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/201982
That definitely transported me to a different time ha. Lovely piece
Nice to see Newgrounds is still alive and more or less unchanged since its early days. With so many of the creative spaces online becoming highly censored hellholes, having a more laissez-faire platform is a breath of fresh air.
One of the worst cultural developments of this century has been creative people becoming censorship-hungry prudes. There is a certain romanticism about being anti-establishment, but then they became the establishment and couldn’t figure out what to do next.
I think you're blaming the wrong people. Most of the censorship I've seen is coming from ad funded platforms wanting to please corporations. Independent artists create all kinds of offensive content.
Unless you mean that there is less slurs and jokes against minorities, which is an improvement tbh.
No doubt the platforms are a problem too, but I was referring to the creatives themselves. Just a few examples I can remember.
In 2020 dozens of Hachette employees walked out over the publisher’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir. Hachette cancelled the book.
Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.
Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.
John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.
Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.
The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.
I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
> Unless you mean that there is less slurs and jokes against minorities, which is an improvement tbh.
Censorship is bad unless I agree with it. Then it’s good. Stunning levels of thought and reason.
Bill Lawrence removed episodes because he and the cast hated that for years after they'd see people at halloween dressing as the characters in blackface, and realised that people were taking the wrong message from the episodes they'd made which were meant to mock the idea of people thinking it was OK to do blackface.
That isn't self-censorship, it's accepting that your work didn't read the way you wanted it to and deciding it's not worth having it out there under your name any more.
Freedom of speech also includes the freedom not to speak, and people should be allowed to say "I don't like this work of mine any more, I'm not continuing to publish it". If you advocate for enforced speech, you are the censor, just using a different tool.
> That isn't self-censorship, it's accepting that your work didn't read the way you wanted it to and deciding it's not worth having it out there under your name any more.
You are confused about the definition of the word censor:
> [to prevent part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/censor)
I understand Lawrence has reasons for his calls for censorship. All censorious people have reasons for their demands. They are still calls for censorship. Lawrence is free to not speak. He's even free to demand that media be censored. No one has argued otherwise.
I'm aware of the definition of censorship, but the context is you saying:
> One of the worst cultural developments of this century has been creative people becoming censorship-hungry prudes.
This is not the same as a dictionary definition of censorship generally.
Presenting people changing their views over time as they learn as some evidence of some new trend of "censorship-hungry prudes" is silly. It's hysteria and a false narrative trying to paint something normal and healthy as equivalent to something dangerous.
The much bigger media preservation issue is actually represented by Scrubs: the fact that all the streaming services now have the show with all the music cut out and replaced with generic royalty-free stuff because the licenses ran out.
> I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship.
Cool, I asked my computer mommy and got about 200,000 examples of creatives demanding less censorship
So we agree that there are many creatives calling for censorship now? Okay.
TV self-censored for years. Elvis was unfit for family viewing. Punks wouldn’t share stages with racists and ejected National Front supporters from gigs. Rock against Racism was founded partly in response to Eric Clapton’s pro-Enoch Powell racist remarks. Dead Kennedeys were not exactly coy about where they drew the line.
If you want medical analogies for COVID, AIDS disinformation is perfect. ACT UP and similar AIDS movements would have laughed you out of creative spaces for bringing misinformation about how AIDS was spread.
If you have ChatGPT tokens going spare, you can ask it for a balanced view of historical artistic deplatforming and self-censoring. I asked mine and, in classic one-liner machine-slop dunk, it said…
“The argument sounds like it is being made by someone under 40 who believes they’re living through a unique historical decline but refuses to read a book, or someone over 40 who missed the world around them. Ask them which they are.”
Elvis wasn't the one calling for censorship. It was religious viewers - the audience.
I'm not denying that there were examples of creatives - like punks - who called for censorship. I'm describing a massive shift in scale and scope.
I did as you suggested because it's important to have a broad and balanced view of the issues. I used the query "Do you believe the scale and scope of creatives calling for censorship is worse, better, or the same today as it was 50 years ago? Provide a detailed response but summarise with one sentence at the end." I used Sol 5.6 Extra High (I'm deliberately avoiding Sol 6 right now due to some issues with hallucinations). I have a system prompt which emphasises accuracy and citations over speed.
I won't paste the entire passage (Hacker News bans and/or rate limits accounts which do that), but I will paste the summary. Note that I've read the analysis in full, and while I am more informed now, it has not changed my opinion.
> "On the specific question of creatives themselves calling for lawful expression to be suppressed, removed or deplatformed, I think the evidence points to it being broader in scope and probably more common today than 50 years ago, although formal government censorship was in some respects more coercive then."
Feel free to ask your research model the same question. I would encourage you to use a better paid model with careful system prompt, direction, and effort. Your model sounds like a petulant teenager.
My robot says:
““use a better paid model” as an argument from authority is magnificent. We’ve somehow reinvented “my dad can beat up your dad,” except our dads are inference-time budgets”.
So there’s that.
Getting back to human responses; it’s hard to argue your robot’s conclusion when it only got to a weak “probably” while comparing the communication environments of 1980’s (no social media) and 2026 (very much social media). Lots more people with lots bigger platforms dealing with lots more voices on what should/shouldn’t be tolerated -> perceived increase in volume of censorship by both audience and other creatives (themselves taking role of both audience and performer playing to their own audience)
Elvis may not have been calling to censor himself, but the hosts and producers (themselves creatives) followed the demands of the audience - surely at least a somewhat close analogy to creatives amplifying the voices of their audiences today?
To get a bit better than your model’s “probably”, maybe we should shoot for specifics. If we agree there was a “dark past” where government and religious pressure created artistic censorship to comparable levels to today, and if I concede to move the argument forward that we’re in “historical decline” now. Where specifically do you put the beginning and end of the “golden age”?
The dark past could of course overlap with the start of the subsequent decline, creating not a golden age but a shit age, centered maybe on the late 80s.
It seems entirely disingenuous to tell me to investigate this in earnest and ask ChatGPT for answers, then dismiss it when it didn't give you the answer you wanted. I gave you the model, the effort level, the query, and the summary, which you could use to confirm what I write. I note that you haven't tested this yourself - ostensibly because you know it will return something similar. Further, you either didn't read my comments or are attempting to straw man them, because I have not stated nor argued that religious and government censorship is equivalent today. I also find the implication in your final question absurd. There is no way to place chronological boxes around cultural change. They are not binary, and I do not believe you think they are.
Your comment is dishonesty wrapped in condescension, and it's clear that you never intended to have any kind of earnest discussion here.
Of all the replies I was expecting from you, this wasn’t on my betting slip.
There’s no condescension here; you had one key thesis I objected to (and, incidentally, were the first to invoke a robot war!)
> I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
My argument is - it did “used to be this way”. Your proxy, as best as I can tell, agreed.
> formal government censorship was in some respects more coercive then.
And your courageous avatar made a weak (e.g. the word probably, not provably and “I think” not “I showed”) supportive claim (I cannot see the reams of research behind the conclusion).
> I think the evidence points to it being broader in scope and probably more common today than 50 years ago
I said, ok, let’s take that at face - where do you feel the transition happend, and posited reasons why the transition may seem stronger (social media).
Now you’re unwilling to argue specifics and off dismissing my sincerity. Adult argument fully abandoned, feelings abound!
So neither of us will learn anything useful today. I’ll never find out specifically when you believe our slippery slope began, and you’ll never explore whether reality matches your thinking. Let’s hope the data centers that powered your race to self-confirmation were running on solar, so at least the environment was spared!
In the hope of rescuing some thread.
> There is no way to place chronological boxes around cultural change.
This is not only demonstrably false, it also turns your initial thesis “it didn’t used to be like this” into a farce. You were the first to claim there was some time boxing we could apply!
It also, candidly, reinforces the first conclusion robo-me reached. “ someone under 40 who believes they’re living through a unique historical decline but refuses to read a book”. My robot gave me 10,000 examples of books on the study and findings of historians researching the evolution of cultural norms over time. It is very much a thing. I very much believe in it sincerely as a valuable discipline.
If you really want to argue that nobody can say Victorian social norms evolved, and were arguably most harmed by the First World War. Or that the gender and sexual attitudes of the post-second-world-war were pushed to breaking point during a period known as the “swinging sixties”. Or that the introduction of social media and camera phones to the schoolyard caused a dramatic change in kids’ behaviors. Then I think you’re being a special kind of Saturday obstinate.
But if you are actually trying to discuss rather than play-fight, try answering the question - when specifically do you think that the decline began, such that we are no longer living in the rose-tinted era where things “used to be”?
And dude, you can back your claim down or add nuance to it - “creatives censor in a different way in the internet era to how the censored in the TV era” is a defensible claim, I’ll even let you have “the nature of what is censored now has changed”. You’re just not getting away with a demonstrably false “there’s more censorship now”.
I don't know much about the "creative people scene" what are some examples of creatives becoming "censorship-hungry prudes"?
In 2020 dozens of Hachette employees walked out over the publisher’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir. Hachette cancelled the book.
Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.
Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.
John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.
Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.
The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.
I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
I actually thought this got posted because of the recent drama around banning OneyPlays
Tupac, you ate my cheetohs!
Your fingers! They Orange!!!
Time to play some Nuclear Eagle. It's a game where you're a momma eagle feeding your chicks. Except you're giant and feed them people. And people don't like being eaten, so it has some GTA-style escalation.
Site is loading super slow for me. Anyone else?
20 second stall loading CSS from some external site.
Wow, I thought it was some anti-crawler tech like Anubis.
Doesn't load at all for me.
Spent insane amounts of time on Newgrounds back in the day, still watch some of the classics (tank men, ultimate showdown, metal gear awesome, etc etc) from time to time. A different internet back then.
Newgrounds got me into learning how to animate, and thus practical techniques to do so quickly.
The community tutorials were good, even if you were drawing technicolor ponies with drug addictions
I've started watching more videos here instead of YouTube. A lot of the creators I follow also release their stuff on newgrounds, so it's easy.
Don’t know what my childhood would have been like without the dress up Brittany spears game! https://web.archive.org/web/20050120091734/http://www.newgro...
This is really depressing to look at in 2026! The internet really was a mistake.
I used to play flash games on this site, one of my favorites was "William and Sly" and also "William and Sly 2".
You can still play them now, they ported it away from flash - which still offered experiences that we are just now beginning to match natively in terms of web gaming and video generation.
They made Sly 2? Oh no, there goes my night...
Playing Stick RPG and Frank’s Adventure in 4th grade >>>>>
Glad to see Kingdom Rush is still there, even after half a dozen iPad apps: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/587194
Maybe just nostalgia talking, but the height of Newgrounds really seemed like a golden age for light gaming. The shift to mobile games has just resulted in a large number of gambling simulators, which I'm sure has been a key reason for the popularity of Kalshi, Polymarket, etc.
I'd say the shift to mobile went through a similar arc into decline as the web, actually.
Newgrounds really was the golden age for web gaming. And, similar to early web, early mobile gaming also started out with nostalgia-worthy charm and heart. You're right that it's been hollowed out, but the same thing happened to web gaming after the Flash era. The social casino era is maybe its 6th reinvention, and its lowest yet.
Now that mobile gaming has been raced to the bottom and consolidated (and thanks to the dual tailwinds of AI making it easy to write code without engines and the web maturing in its 3d+networking capabilities) we're started to see a resurgence of web-based games - it's my full-time job now! Granted we still do rely on mobile apps (as web wrappers) for monetization, but that wall is crumbling rapidly.
Would you share who you're working for? I'm looking for a switch to web game development, I already have some experience with it but I did lost all the hope that the web was still the platform where to play some games
Gambling aside, the median quality of a modern mobile game is worse than what we had on newgrounds.
NG didn't have multiple 500MB downloads, buttons in the wrong place, pointless currencies. More importantly NG artists actually cared. I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.
Software in general is worse than it used to be 20 years ago. My conjecture is that as the software industry got bigger and bigger, the number of people who cared about doing good work stayed the same, which meant a higher percentage of work has been done by people who don't care. But regardless of the cause, quality in our industry is way down.
> I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.
WebAssembly is better compilation target and runtime than Flash ever was. Many languages can compile to WebAssembly.
I think what you want is an authoring tool like Flash. Why not make that tool? Or if you don't want to make it, Rive's a pretty good animation engine. You can make games with it:
https://rive.app/
https://rive.app/docs/scripting/demos
Assuming you're not looking at the file sizes involved...
SWF is extremely compact, since it was intended to be used over a dialup connection. Flash worked because the player was preinstalled on the computer.
The newer Ruffle player is a 10MB download in addition to the actual flash file. You get a new freshly downloaded copy of Ruffle from every site that's hosting Flash content.
> Assuming you're not looking at the file sizes involved
The internet has very much moved on.
A three minute, 1080p YouTube music video encoded in AV1 video with Opus audio is 30 megabytes. No one bats an eyelash at downloading that.
To prove it, this one has been downloaded 2.6 billion times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekr2nIex040
To even further prove it, this one has been downloaded 17 billion times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w
Yeah, home internet (cable, etc) is fast. Mobile internet is not.
Seems plenty fast enough to me.
I have an old phone. I'm on one of the cheapest plans. I ran a speed test with https://speedtest.net and I got 124 megabits per second. That's 15 megabytes per second, 900 megabytes per minute, which is 90x more than YouTube's 1080p video rate of 10 megabytes per minute.
Ruffle is also available as a Firefox extension. Maybe install that and be happy: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ruffle_rs/
The swf player was definitely smaller, through some miracle — I remember marveling at how quick it was to install it the first time, and I’m pretty sure that’s a big reason Flash became so ubiquitous that you could just blindly assume its presence by 2002 or so - the install was small even for dial-up, and required like one click.
But compared to the average internet user’s connection speed or their consumed bandwidth at this time, 10MB is probably smaller. We just don’t put it in a plugin today because the browser cache can handle that just fine, and because it means the code is more sandboxed, and that if it needs updates, managing that is easy for the game publisher to do.
> I understand why Apple killed Flash
In retrospect, it turns out the reasons were a load of bollocks. Modern web is 10 times more bloated than Flash ever was, and nobody cares.
Wasn't the main reason that it was really difficult to keep the sandbox secure?
Thank God we made the web so much safer!!
There's at least one industry that reaaaaally got fucked with the sunsetting of Flash: e learning
> Wasn't the main reason that it was really difficult to keep the sandbox secure?
It basically ran JavaScript. It's no harder to sandbox Flash than it's to sandbox any HTML5 website. Arguably much easier because there was no JIT back then. Flash also ran in an enclosed box on a website and had no access to DOM, which greatly lowers attack surface.
I would argue the height of light gaming was the height of Kongregate, which was a little past newgrounds' own.
The games were more polished by the time, but still quite wild.
That seems a reach to say the popularity of kalshi and polymarket is down to gambling simulators.
Id wager (heh) that it's much more down to a lack of regulation combined with the normalisation of influencer driven get rich quick but pretend it's clever investing that exploded in popularity with crypto and wallstreetbets style influencer investing. Combine that with house prices being where they are and people get risky with investing as their hope outstrips their caution.
I don't think a few rounds of balatro or slotomania leads to that.
The crazy thing is there was a period between Newgrounds games and mobile games: Facebook games. It was so popular at that moment and so insignificant hindsight that we barely remember it.
Yep. Mafia Wars was what led to to quit FB in 2009. Writing was on the wall.
that's quite a reach. much more obviously, the shift to mobile games has resulted in predatory pay2win "micro"transactions and ads everywhere. the last time I'd tried to find something new to play on the shitter, seemingly every random game I got from the playstore wanted an AAA's worth of $ to unlock features and/or was full of ads. and they weren't even those coomer bait gachas everyone with half a brain knows to avoid.
i dont think its the sites. people always blame the sites. but people became lazy and hungry for dopamine. they arent creating cool stuff anymore but almost get upset or withdrawl if someone else dont shove something 'new and exciting' down their throats
internet is not the only thin that suffers it. TV, music, its the same. Listen to what kids played music ,movies, toys etc. in 60, 70, 80, 90s up to today. you will see very sharp changes, first in how they occupy themselves and then in how they shape society -_- for their kids to go into the next dumbing down cycle.
(yes v cynical and black n white put. easier to word)
The Problems of the Future... Today!
Lots of fond memories of this website. I have many flash games and animations still on there. My favorite period of the internet.
I literally thought of newgrounds today and how different and wild it would be with world models and AI generated games. Then it shows up #1… wild.
> AI generated games
I really wish that will never happen. For now it produces crappy clones of existing games
Is my old college dorm neighbor Tim P in the chat? Holy flashback from the era of Flash animation and Java everything
New Mandela effect unlocked: "Remember when newgrounds ceased to exist?"
Or maybe I'm just not paying attention...
It peaked and went on a decline in the period before companies were snatching up sites just to merge their user bases.
Had newgrounds continued into the 2010's, it would've been bought by Google to boost Google Wave / Circles / Plus whatever, and then it would've been actually shutdown.
So its age is actually what helped it survive I suspect.
Go watch Claveman and Tankmen if you haven't seen them. Work of art.
pre-teen me loved newgrounds, we would play at school hiding the browser from teachers, this was before they had implemented filtering
Frog in a Blender. All time.
Heli Attack 3
What a treat to see this pop up here. I used to be obsessed with Madness flash shorts back in the day. Got me into Flash and web tooling in general. A testament to the prime 2000s web.
These are amazing, will there be an AI label? Would be good to give love and support to human game devs and not AI slop
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/terms-of-us...
funny to see Decline of video gaming xD.. they should make a 2026 one lol
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