Newgrounds

Newgrounds is an entertainment website, social networking service and company founded by Tom Fulp in 1995. It hosts user-generated content such as games, films, audio, and artwork. Fulp produces in-house content at the headquarters and offices in Glenside, Pennsylvania. In the 2000s and 2010s, Newgrounds played an important role in Internet culture, and in Internet animation and independent video gaming in particular. It has been called a "distinct time in gaming history", a place "where many animators and developers cut their teeth and gained a following long before social media was even a thing", and "a haven for fostering the greats of internet animation". User-generated content can be uploaded and categorized into either one of the site's four web portals: Games, Movies, Audio, and Art. A Movie or Games submission entered undergoes the process termed "judgment", where it can be rated by all users (from 0 to 5 stars) and reviewed by other users. The average score calculated at various points during judgment determines if whether the content will be "saved" (added onto the database) or "blammed" (deleted with only its reviews saved in the "Obituaries" section). Since Adobe Flash Player was shut down on most current browsers by late 2020, Newgrounds uses the Ruffle emulator, an Adobe Flash emulator written in Rust and is sponsored by Newgrounds along with other popular sites like Cool Math Games and Armor Games for content created with Flash. As of 2022, Ruffle only supported a select few number of Flash projects written in ActionScript 3.0 which meant users had to download the "Newgrounds Player", the site's own Flash emulator which it used prior to Ruffle, to run projects written in AS3. Art and Audio are processed using a different method called "scouting", which the site describes as "a way to vet users and weed out spam, stolen works, low quality submissions, etc." All users can put art and audio onto their own page, but only those that are "scouted" will appear in the public area.