On this day in 1995, Newgrounds happened!
Well, it kinda did. You'll have to read on to understand it all though.
That's how we reel you in.
So the concept of Newgrounds is generally pinpointed to the date of July 12th 1995 as this marks the creation of the website New Grounds Remix by a then 17 year old Tom Fulp, which would prove to be the basis of what Newgrounds would become. The site was originally created to host some of the BBS games (Bulletin Board Style games) Tom was developing at the time, and following some experimentation in Flash and hosting of his content on a second site entitled Telebubby Fun Land, he eventually decided to merge the two, under the new domain name Newgrounds.
Originally these sites hosted Tom's work and Tom's work alone, yet despite the limited content a community begun to flourish. With this growth in interested though came a growth in hosting costs, with numbers leaping dramatically from $33 a month to over $1000, but Tom was able to find aid in the form of a partnership with the trash masters Troma Pictures, who agreed to host the site in exchange for a share in the site's ad revenue. The community only further swelled with the introduction of a chat room and a message board, which allowed community members to send their content to Tom, which in turn would lead to the creation of "the portal" in 1999.
While this all may sound like Newgrounds' conception and development was a pretty sweet deal, the reality was unfortunately not quite that peachy for Tom and co. By the arrival of the 00s things were looking bad for not just Newgrounds, but countless other websites at the time. For most websites at the time the Dot-com bubble bursting around this time was a huge blow, however Newgrounds had further issues such as Troma pulling out of hosting duties in 2003. The site's crew managed to stabilise the page during these trying times with a switch in bandwidth provider to reduce costs, however it was thanks to an event in 2004 that really gave them a glimmer of hope for a prospective future. That year, the video Numa Numa Dance was uploaded, where it became one of the first ever viral videos, a year before the creation of YouTube.
The years following this proved well for Newgrounds and its community of loyal artists and audience, with the addition of art and music portals as well as videos and games, and from 2011 those contributing could now upload video content in file formats other than .swf. 2013 would see the site struggle yet again with financial woes, which led to the closure of their online store, but just five years later things were looking up once again with the rolling out of everything from new servers and improved page performance, to new video encoding software and plans to go ad free. 2018 also saw a huge surge in users as folk from Tumblr migrated to Newgrounds to escape the oppression they faced in wake of Tumblr's new no buttholes or nipples policy being ruthlessly enforced. For a brief period there were concerns that the ceasing of Flash support online by the end of 2020 would once again doom the site, however the teams have been hard at work creating a player than will allow old content to still be viewed and played after the Flash crash, meaning you never have to worry about being unable to see all your favourite stick man fight videos ever again.
Regardless of its struggles and obstacles however, Newgrounds has remained an incredible home for many artists, some of who have since made the leap from the site and have led even greater ventures in entertainment. A prime example would come once again from Tom himself, who alongside Dan Paladin and John Baez conceived Behemoth Games, most lovingly known for the titles Castle Crashers and Alien Hominid, the latter of which begun as a Flash game on Newgrounds, and Edmund McMillen who is best known for Super Meat Boy and the Binding of Issac games also made his humble beginnings on the site.
As well as providing some of the best indie game talent going, there is also the animation talent alumni to come out of Newgrounds, which include David Firth, Weebl/Jonti Pickering, Edd Gould, Egoraptor/Arin Hanson, Oney/Chris O'Neill, Psychicpebbles/Zach Hadel, Harry Partridge, (William) Stamper, and TomSka/Thomas Ridgewell.
This talent pool of artists have also been responsible for, but not all of, some of the sites most popular content, which include Pico, Weebl & Bob, Skull Kid, Salad Fingers, Dad'n'me, the Clock Crew, Brackenwood, Foamy's Rants, the Madness Series, The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, the Awesome series, Leo and Satan, Animator vs Animation, Xiao Xiao, All Your Base, Charlie the Unicorn, Star Wars Gangsta Rap, Resident Koopa, Smile, and the charmingly named Retarded Animal Babies.
For a while and arguably even to this day a large bulk of the site's content is parody cartoons, fan-fictions, and sprite animations, a lot of which used commercial and licensed music and properties that has since landed the site in trouble with the crackdown of unauthorised use of copyright material on the web. Not only that, but the site's hosting of questionable content from earlier days which feature racism, sexism, homophobia, aggressive and violent themes, and shock/offensive humour has also caused a stir amongst creators and audiences alike, however an audience for this content was there once given these uploads survived Newgrounds' unique user rating system, which dictates what content should stay or go upon submission. Along with DeviantArt and Tumblr the site also has quite a notable Sonic the Hedgehog fanbase, with plenty of OC characters and animations using sprites from the games being uploaded to 'grounds on the daily.
Still though, Newgrounds continues to operate out Glenside Pennsylvania quite content with its content, and we can only hope that it continues to do so, on today, the date of its anniversary.
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