Newgrounds

Newgrounds is a website that hosts Macromedia Flash animations. It was created and is currently owned by Tom Fulp (right). It allows its users to submit their own Flash movies and games and music and view submissions from other users. The site now has over 700,000 registered members and over 60,000 submissions.

Newgrounds also allows users to rate and review other user's 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.

Contents

1 Time line 2 Newgrounds originals 3 Groups, crews and rivalries 4 External links

Time line

• 1978 - Tom Fulp is born April 30, 1978 in Pennsylvania.
• 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 - March, 1998 - 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.
• Spring, 1998 - Summer, 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 (http://newgrounds.com/tubby/) Flash movie was made.
• Fall, 1998 - 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 (http://newgrounds.com/ufa) and Samurai Asshole (http://newgrounds.com/samurai).
• 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 (http://newgrounds.com/shooter/) and the Police Simulator (http://newgrounds.com/police/). He met Shok, a Newgrounds member, at a Philadelphia nightclub. They became good friends and co-created FDA (http://newgrounds.com/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 (http://newgrounds.com/shuttle/) and Captain Low-Rez (http://newgrounds.com/captain_lowrez/).
• 2001 - 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 (http://newgrounds.com/portal/view.php?id=59593), 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 also upgraded. Tom released three new games: Domo-Kun's Angry Smashfest (http://newgrounds.com/portal/view.php?id=73449), Chainsaw the Children (http://newgrounds.com/portal/view.php?id=71851) and Sack Smash 2003 (http://newgrounds.com/portal/view.php?id=73750). 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.
• 2004 - Tom and artist Dan Paladin (Synj) released the console version of their game Alien Hominid.
• 2004 - Locally infamous and somewhat revered Josh Bend (owner 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.
• 2004 - A group of flash artists, known as "The Star Syndicate" makes it's 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 it's 100th episode. 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.
• 2005 - Newgrounds received a submission from gman250, called The Numa Numa Dance. It receives national publicity for both the site, and Gman - also known as Gary. The Flash movie rapidly circulated around the internet and was featured in many major newspapers, such as The New York Times and Boston Globe, and TV shows, including VH1's Best Week Ever, and the Today Show.
  Tom Fulp's Alien Hominid was nominated in the 2005 Independent Games Festival (IGF), and went on to receive three awards, though not the grand prize which went to Edmund McMillen (an artist Tom Fulp is a big fan of and helps promote) for his game Gish.

Newgrounds originals

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

Some of his favourite work by users are:

Domo Kun Angry Smash Fest!

Pico

Alien Hominid

Groups, crews and rivalries

Many groups of people have formed in the Newgrounds community, including the Clock Crew and its spinoffs: the Lock Legion and the Star Syndicate 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.

Some famous collabs on the Newgrounds portal include:

• Newgrounds Jam
• A Simple Line
• NG Vs.
• Newgrounds Time Trial
• One Love
• Artificial High
• Daily Toons
• Shades of Ghey
• 10 Second Showcase
• The Locklegion's Hotel California
• The Matrix Has You/The Matrix Still Has You (orchestrated by Legendary Frog)
• Various works by The Clock Crew
• The 5 Shades of Green
• The 5 Shades of Red
• The 5 Shades of Blue
• Stop Cryin Your Heart Out

External links

• Newgrounds website (http://www.newgrounds.com/)
• Alien Hominid website (http://www.alienhominid.com/)
• ClockCrew website (http://www.clockcrew.net/)
• LockLegion website (http://www.locklegion.com/)
• StarSyndicate website (http://s7.invisionfree.com/Star_Syndicate/index.php)nl:Newgrounds

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