How did a 13-year-old's Neo Geo zine turn into a website?
Newgrounds started on paper. In 1991 Tom Fulp, then 13, published a Neo Geo fanzine called New Ground from his parents' basement in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, and mailed sporadic issues to around 100 members of a club on the Prodigy online service.
In 1995 Fulp got his own web space and carried the name online as New Ground Remix. Newgrounds counts July 6, 1995 as its founding date, which made July 6, 2025 its thirtieth birthday as a website.
The turn came in 1998, when Fulp started experimenting with Macromedia Flash. After a call from the TV show Inside Edition about his game Assassin, he registered a domain that would be easy to remember on screen and paid $33 a month out of pocket to host it. "In 1998, I picked up Flash and my life changed forever," Fulp writes on the Newgrounds about page.
Traffic grew faster than the money. By 1999 his host wanted more than $1,000 a month and his only good ad company had dropped him over the site's content, so Fulp partnered with the film studio Troma, which hosted Newgrounds in exchange for a cut of ad revenue. That arrangement lasted until February 2003.
What actually came out of the Portal?
The Portal started in 1999 as a page where Fulp dumped small projects and then began hosting other people's Flash files, each one hand coded into its own HTML page. On April 6, 2000, Newgrounds automated it. By the site's own account it was the first website anywhere to allow instant self-serve publishing for movies and games, four and a half years before YouTube launched.
That single change turned a personal showcase into a career pipeline. Fulp's Pico's School (1999) became the reference point for what Flash 3 could do. Alien Hominid, built with artist Dan Paladin in 2002, started as a Portal game; the two formed The Behemoth on April 1, 2003, and the console version reached stores in November 2004. The studio's follow-up, Castle Crashers, arrived on Xbox Live Arcade in August 2008. "In the 11 years since its launch, the game has sold over 20 million copies," The Behemoth wrote in 2019.
Animation did the same thing. Salad Fingers, Eddsworld and the Madness series all grew inside the Portal, and the Numa Numa Dance premiered on Newgrounds on December 6, 2004, a full year before YouTube opened. The Audio Portal followed in 2003 so musicians could be credited in other people's work, and an Art Portal arrived in June 2009. Much like Homestar Runner, the site proved that a small crew could hold an audience without a network behind it.
When did Newgrounds peak, and what knocked it down?
The clearest peak markers are bandwidth bills. Newgrounds went from a 100mbps cap to 300mbps during 2003, was consuming 500mbps by the end of 2004, and blew past 800mbps during peak hours in December 2005. Time ranked it among the 50 best websites of 2010.
Two things ended that run. The first was video. YouTube made watching easier than the SWF format ever would, and by 2012 Fulp described a site where his own efforts were not changing the trajectory and everyone was, in his words on the history wiki, "livin' la vida YouTube."
The second was ad blocking. Newgrounds ran a 2009 experiment showing banners only to ad block users, which mostly made them angry. "we would go on to lose well over half our revenue to adblock," Fulp wrote on the Newgrounds history wiki, "and it's a big reason why you guys don't get to have nice things." A 2013 peering dispute between Verizon and Cogent, the site's bandwidth provider, throttled it further. Plenty of contemporaries did not survive that stretch at all, as the shutdown of GeoCities showed.
What happened when Adobe killed Flash?
Adobe set the date years in advance and hit it. "Flash will be completely removed from all browsers by December 31, 2020, via Windows Update," Microsoft told administrators in its lifecycle notice in 2020. Adobe began blocking Flash content from running on January 12, 2021, which Fulp called the true end of Flash day.
Newgrounds had been preparing since 2011, when staffer Mike built Swivel to convert SWF files to video. In April 2019 the site shipped Newgrounds Player, a desktop application that keeps Flash content playable, with support for medals, high scores and shared creations. In August 2019 it introduced Ruffle, an open-source Flash emulator written in Rust, and started switching classic content over to it in 2020.
The migration is still running. Ruffle gained working medals and high scores for ActionScript 2 games in October 2020, picked up Flash video support in October 2021, and pushed into ActionScript 3 from 2023, after which Newgrounds switched on emulation for thousands more games in the second half of 2024. Newgrounds put $6,000 into Ruffle development in 2021 alone. The full story of the format is in the history of Macromedia Flash.
The archive survived, and so did the audience. Friday Night Funkin' debuted on Newgrounds on November 1, 2020, and when its Week 7 update landed on April 18, 2021 the site broke its one-day record with 1.2 million views on a single piece of content. The game's Kickstarter, launched the same day, raised more than $2 million.
Who runs Newgrounds in 2026?
Tom Fulp does, and he never sold. Pages across the site carry a Newgrounds, Inc. copyright line reading 1995 to 2026, and the staff page lists him as founder and guy in charge alongside three others: senior programmers Josh Tuttle, who joined in 2008, and James Holloway, who joined in 2002, plus staff artist Jeff Bandelin, who joined in 2006. The company works out of Glenside, Pennsylvania, in a building Fulp bought in 2005.
"Newgrounds has been self-sustained since its inception, free of investor and corporate interests," Fulp writes on the about page. There is no parent company and no acquisition anywhere in the site's history.
The recent work is unglamorous. A large denial-of-service attack in September 2025 led to a screening layer called NG Guard, and the site added age verification for United Kingdom users to comply with the Online Safety Act. Fulp's own summary of 2026 on the history wiki is that overhauls and regulatory compliance remain the heavy themes, alongside a mobile refresh in May 2026. He is still making games too, including a long-delayed console project called Nightmare Cops.
How does Newgrounds pay for itself now?
Mostly through readers, and not comfortably. Newgrounds launched its Supporter upgrade in September 2012 at $25 for a year of ad-free browsing. It took until Thanksgiving 2018 to reach 2,000 active supporters, a jump helped by Tumblr's ban on adult content, which sent more than 1,000 new artists to the Art Portal within days.
The numbers have improved without solving the problem. "We finished the year with nearly 5,800 Supporters but NG continued to run at a loss," Fulp wrote in the 2021 entry of the history wiki, in a year when the site also sent more than $40,000 to the community in prizes and drawing tablets. In October 2024 Newgrounds added Takeover Tuesday, which lets each supporter feature one item on the front page each week.
In 2026 the pitch is a monthly subscription starting at $5 or a yearly one from $36, which works out to $3 a month paid up front. The site still runs a small amount of advertising on A-rated games and movies. Fulp's stated targets on the history wiki are to "stop losing money, keep increasing the monthly prizes and gradually phase out the last remaining ads." Monthly creator prizes passed $5,000 for the Best of June 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Newgrounds still active in 2026?
Yes. Newgrounds is online and publishing new games, animation, art and music in 2026, more than 31 years after Tom Fulp founded it on July 6, 1995. The site ran its eleventh annual Pixel Day on January 23, 2026 and its sixth annual Flash Forward game jam that spring.
Can you still play old Flash games on Newgrounds?
Yes. Adobe Flash Player reached end of life on December 31, 2020, but Newgrounds runs its classic archive through Ruffle, an open-source Flash emulator it began sponsoring in 2019, and offers Newgrounds Player, a desktop application released in April 2019, for content Ruffle cannot handle yet. Thousands more games were switched over to Ruffle in the second half of 2024.
Who owns Newgrounds?
Newgrounds is owned by Newgrounds, Inc., the private company founded by Tom Fulp, who still runs it from Glenside, Pennsylvania. It has never been acquired and has no outside investors, and the staff page listed four people in 2026.