Who made Homestar Runner, and where did it start?
Homestar Runner started on paper. In 1996 Mike Chapman and Craig Zobel, then University of Georgia students working summer jobs around the Atlanta Olympics, wrote and drew a picture book called The Homestar Runner Enters the Strongest Man in the World Contest, a parody of the cheap children's books they had seen at a mall.
They made only a handful of copies, for friends and family. The characters then sat unused for four years.
The website came in 2000. Mike Chapman and his brother Matt Chapman taught themselves Macromedia Flash, rebuilt the characters as animation, and put homestarrunner.com online on January 1, 2000.
The two worked under the name The Brothers Chaps. They wrote, drew, animated and voiced nearly everything themselves, which is why every character sounds like one of two guys in a room in Georgia.
Flash made that possible. A cartoon that would have needed a broadcast budget in 1995 could be drawn by two people and downloaded over a 56k modem in 2000, which is the same reason Macromedia Flash carried almost every web cartoon of that decade.
How did Strong Bad take the site over?
Homestar Runner was the title character. Strong Bad, a masked heavy in boxing gloves, was written as the villain, and he ended up running the place.
The reason was a format. In Strong Bad Email, Strong Bad reads a message from a real fan on an ancient computer and answers it badly. A new one went up most Mondays from 2002 through 2008, and the email was the thing people checked for.
Email number 58, called dragon, went online on January 13, 2003. In it Strong Bad draws a dragon built out of "consummate V's" and names it Trogdor the Burninator. Trogdor became the most reproduced thing the site ever made, printed on shirts, worked into a heavy metal theme song, and later turned into a board game.
The 200th Strong Bad Email, email thunder, arrived on September 23, 2008. Mike Chapman and Matt Chapman treated 200 as a round number to stop at, and the weekly rhythm never came back. New emails now show up years apart, usually attached to a holiday or a joke about the gap itself.
Who owns Homestar Runner today?
Mike Chapman and Matt Chapman still own Homestar Runner in 2026. The site was never sold to a network, a studio or a media group, and it has never run advertising.
The money came from merchandise instead. The first shirts went out by mail from the family house: "you needed to send a check to our parent's house," Mike Chapman said in the oral history The Billfold published in 2017, and the brothers moved a few dozen shirts that way in 2001. Their retired parents handled much of the business side, and their father kept the books.
Shirt sales grew into hoodies, plush toys and DVD compilations, and that revenue covered the cost of running the site and the brothers' living costs. Matt Chapman left his other work to make Homestar Runner full time in 2002.
The model still works. In 2026 Greater Than Games put Crime Scene Tamperer into retail, a party card game for two to four players set in the Dangeresque corner of the Homestar Runner world, designed by Mike Chapman and Matt Chapman and priced at $19.95.
Why did the site go quiet after 2010?
The updates thinned out through 2010 and then stopped. The last new material of that era went up in December 2010, and nothing followed for more than three years.
Both brothers had families and television work by then. Matt Chapman moved into writing and voice work on animated shows, and the site had no deadline structure left once the Monday email habit broke. Mike Chapman has said the pair had spent close to ten years delivering a weekly cartoon.
The return came on April 1, 2014, with an April Fools' Day cartoon that made fun of how long the site had sat still. The reaction was large enough that the brothers kept going, and by July 2014 they had said publicly that more was coming.
They were careful about what they were promising. "We're not expecting this to be our full-time gig, we just want this to be fun," Matt Chapman told Rolling Stone in 2014, adding that the original run had been a great job and also a stressful one.
A year later they took a paid gig with the same sensibility. Two More Eggs ran on Disney XD from June 2015, and its third and final season arrived in August 2017.
What happened when Flash died?
Adobe ended Flash Player on December 31, 2020, and every browser dropped support. For a site whose entire archive, hundreds of cartoons and games, was built in Flash, that was an extinction event.
Homestar Runner met the deadline on the day. On December 31, 2020, homestarrunner.com relaunched around Ruffle, an open-source Flash emulator that runs the original files inside the browser with nothing to install. The notice the brothers posted opens "What happened our website?" and credits the Ruffle project for the cartoons still playing.
The rebuilt site pairs HTML5 and JavaScript with embedded Ruffle players and keeps the old layout on purpose. It also fixed something Flash never could: the archive works on phones, which it had never done on iOS.
That same notice is honest about the limits. Ruffle was still in development, and games made after roughly 2007 are the roughest under emulation. The original Flash version is parked at old.homestarrunner.com for reference.
Plenty of that era's writing simply vanished instead. Text blogs had it easier than Flash did, which is why LiveJournal archives outlasted most of the animation of the same years.
How often do new cartoons appear now?
Homestar Runner updates without a schedule. New toons arrive in clusters rather than weekly, often months apart, and Halloween is still the most reliable date on the calendar: the costume cartoon has been a fixture since the site's first year.
2026 has followed that pattern. The site's toons page carries new Strong Bad material dated 2026, promotion for the Crime Scene Tamperer game, and a Halloween offering built as new add-on content for an older cartoon rather than a new one from scratch.
The 25th anniversary fell on January 1, 2025, and the brothers marked it in April 2025 with a song, Back to a Website, about the version of the web the site was built for. They called the milestone "25 dot coms".
The site itself has not changed shape. It is free, it has no account, no feed, no recommendation engine and no advertising. You open homestarrunner.com and click a cartoon, which in 2026 makes it an unusual thing to find rather than a normal one.
That puts it in a short club. Most of its neighbors from the Flash cartoon era shut down or became something else, and Newgrounds is one of the few other survivors still run by the people who started it.
Where to find one today
Everything on homestarrunner.com is free to watch, so nothing has to be bought in order to see it. New official merchandise is sold through the site's own store, and Crime Scene Tamperer reached game shops in 2026 at $19.95.
The older physical items are a different matter. The DVD compilations the brothers sold in the 2000s are long out of print, and those discs circulate second-hand along with shirts and plush from the same years. Condition drives what a copy costs, so compare a few listings before buying on a marketplace such as Etsy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Homestar Runner still updating in 2026?
Yes. Homestar Runner still posts new cartoons at homestarrunner.com in 2026, on no fixed schedule and often with months between updates. The site came back from a silence of more than three years on April 1, 2014, and has run irregularly ever since, with the Halloween cartoon as its most dependable annual entry.
Who owns Homestar Runner?
Mike Chapman and Matt Chapman, the pair known as The Brothers Chaps, created Homestar Runner in 2000 and still own and run it in 2026. The site was never sold to a network or a studio, has never carried advertising, and has been funded by merchandise since the brothers started selling shirts by mail in 2001.
Do the old Homestar Runner cartoons still work without Flash?
They do. Adobe ended Flash Player on December 31, 2020, and on that same day homestarrunner.com relaunched around the Ruffle emulator, which plays the original Flash files in a normal browser with nothing to install. The Homestar Runner archive also works on phones now, which it never did while the site depended on Flash.