Newgrounds

The portal that never curated — and preserved more because of it.

Built on permissiveness

Newgrounds launched in 1995 as Tom Fulp's personal page, a corner of the early web where he put things he had made. By the late 1990s other people were uploading too, and the site had become something closer to an open submission system than a curated destination. That permissiveness was not a design philosophy so much as an absence of restriction, and it turned out to matter enormously for what survived.

Where portals like Miniclip selected from a catalogue and presented a clean consumer experience, Newgrounds accepted nearly everything. Animations, games, experiments, parodies of things that no longer exist — the site's library is as close to a complete cross-section of Flash-era amateur and semi-professional production as anything that remains. Because the bar was low, the breadth was extraordinary.

The site built its own community infrastructure early: a voting system called the Portal, a scouting system for art submissions, an audio library, and user accounts going back to the late 1990s. None of that infrastructure was designed with preservation in mind. It was designed to let the site function without a large editorial staff. Preservation was a side effect.

What the library actually contains

At its peak, Newgrounds held hundreds of thousands of Flash files — Adobe's SWF format was the native container for almost everything the site hosted. The games ranged from browser curiosities built in an afternoon to serial productions with multiple entries and dedicated fanbases. The animations included short comedy pieces, music videos, collaborative anthologies like the Madness series from Krinkels, and work by people who later moved into commercial studios. None of it required installation; everything ran in the browser the moment the plugin was present.

When Adobe ended Flash support on the last day of 2020 and browsers moved to block the runtime entirely, the question of what happened to those files became urgent. Newgrounds had anticipated the problem. In 2020 the site began integrating Ruffle, an open-source Flash emulator written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, directly into its own player. The decision was made before the deadline, not after it, and it meant that a significant portion of the archive remained accessible without the user needing to install anything or locate an older browser.

The integration was not seamless — Ruffle's ActionScript 3 support lagged behind its ActionScript 2 coverage for some time, and complex games that relied on later Flash features were still unplayable. But the breadth of older material, much of it built on ActionScript 1 or 2, was recoverable in a way it might not have been had the site waited.

Why the absence of curation was preservation

The Internet Archive and projects like BlueMaxima's Flashpoint took a different approach to the same problem: gather the files themselves, package the environment, distribute the result. Newgrounds did something structurally different by keeping the files on its own servers and updating the runtime around them. The archive did not move; the player did.

That approach works only if the hosting survives, which is not guaranteed. But it illustrates a point the preservation community has debated for years: emulating the runtime rather than the game is often the more scalable solution, because it applies to an entire catalogue at once rather than one title at a time. Newgrounds, almost by accident, ended up demonstrating this at scale.

The Video Game History Foundation has argued that the vast majority of commercial games from earlier eras are effectively inaccessible, locked behind discontinued platforms or unavailable for purchase. Newgrounds represents a different failure mode: material that was always free, always browser-based, always widely distributed — and still nearly lost when the runtime disappeared beneath it. The site's survival as an active host, rather than an archived snapshot, is the reason that failure mode was partial rather than total.

What Newgrounds preserves is not a canon. It is a mass: unfiltered, inconsistent, occasionally strange. That is exactly why it matters.

The portal that never curated — and preserved more because of it.