Newgrounds: Flash Forward 2025 | Hacker News Reader

Newgrounds: Flash Forward 2025

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Newgrounds taught me about the "fair use" defense when parodying wayyyyy back when their "Teletubby fun land" got them the ire of the BBC's lawyers.

I can't find anything documenting that saga -- in fact, it looks like a lot of the early content from before the "auto portal" an early precursor to video portal like Youtube -- called such because for a spell you had to email Tom your work to be featured in the "portal" -- clicking it took you a random user contribution, and below it was a hand curated list.

People forget how innovative, on a technical level, games like "Pico's School" were in the 90s.

I still remember a computer camp counselor admonishing me "you shouldn't know what that is, you're a kid" when first shown Linux and told to "open pico" and blurted out "I didn't know Tom Fulp made linux too".

Anyways thanks for the blast to the past OP -- I had no idea the site was still thriving, happy to hear it.

(And I hope one day they can resurrect the old school "Assassin" games)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico%27s_School

I remember reading an article about how Newgrounds was contacted by the BBC around the time the Teletubbies game was published and they thought they were in trouble for the Teletubbies game, but actually the email was about interviewing them about the success of their Club a Baby Seal game.

There was absolutely a brief legal threat paired with a comedic "fuck you we have fair use" page up on their site at one point.

I don't think they'd be talking about fair use if they were just being interviewed about how mean they allegedly were.

https://www.newgrounds.com/tubby/wired.html

There's a press section, but nothing directly from the BBC

This simply states "This file is hosted on Newgrounds.com"

weird, seems to work for me

But try the parent directory

It's probably because of referrers, opened it in an incognito window and it worked just fine.

https://www.newgrounds.com/tubby/netfreedom.html

This is the page I was referring to. Looks like the nonprofit involved might not still be around?

> Newgrounds taught me about the "fair use" defense when parodying wayyyyy back when their "Teletubby fun land" got them the ire of the BBC's lawyers.

> I can't find anything documenting that saga[…]

You can find Teletubby Fun Land here: <https://www.newgrounds.com/tubby>. If you want to read more about the BBC situation, then click on the middle finger that’s on that page.

> (And I hope one day they can resurrect the old school "Assassin" games)

https://www.newgrounds.com/collection/assassin

>You can find Teletubby Fun Land here: <https://www.newgrounds.com/tubby>. If you want to read more about the BBC situation, then click on the middle finger that’s on that page.

Thanks for that, sadly it looks like as I said, Assassin is gone for good :(

>Unfortunately most of my early Assassin games were deleted when the 2012 site redesign launched and a bunch of old files were cleared out. My original games had never been part of the Portal system so they were easy to overlook.

Aw. They dropped all the adult games, though.

They seem to be using Ruffle, the Flash emulator written in Rust which runs in WebAssembly.

(Flash was a good product in its day. Perhaps better than HTML/CSS/Javascript.)

It was both better and worse. Much better in that every kid could create interactive web stuff. Much worse because of the reasons the plugin got finally dropped from everywhere (after which the advertisers found other ways to abuse our browsers).

With chrome we went from having a plugin that's abused for malvertising to a whole browser. Google can't die fast enough.

Dropped? They started requiring you to log in and toggle a setting to show them a few years ago.

Meet and- HUH?

I'd rather have Flash and HTML 4 than HTML 5. At least with Flash you could simply not install it if you didn't want over the top web pages.

I hope the Brothers Chaps do something similar to resurrect Homestar Runner.

Newgrounds, Flash games, and Mochi ads are how I got my career started. I miss how easy it was to get your game distributed all over.

I wrote a bit about it: https://austinhenley.com/blog/8lessons8games.html

Always love to see Flash games getting some love. That was a magical era in many ways, and in my opinion some Flash games rose to the level of real art.

I spent a lot of my childhood on Newgrounds. I’m happy to see it alive and kicking.

Same. That's a name I hadn't seen or even thought about for 25 years. Amazed it's still going.

A fantasy of mine is to develop a fork of Unity but with an editor interface exactly like Flash, that transpiles Actionscript code to Unity's C#, or maybe a subset of typescript would be a better compromise given it's popularity (either by transpiling or by using node/deno bindings to Unity's Api), to truly make unity games as easy to make as flash games used to be, and with the option to export the project to real Unity in case you need to do something more advanced.

Reminds me of https://discussions.unity.com/t/uniswf-flash-to-unity/481812 which was made by an acquaintance of mine. In this case you used the Flash editor but the SWF ran in the Unity runtime.

How about Godot? You can actually fork that since its open-source.

That's true but what mattigames is describing is so far afield of what Godot actually does that one might as well just start from scratch.

Also, I'd be careful making something with a UI that was exactly like an Adobe product, and that essentially matched its function, that UI may be under patent. This is why GIMP can't exactly copy Photoshop's UI.

Perhaps some kind of Mandela effect, but I would have adamantly sworn I remember newgrounds shutting down.

My friends and I spent many hours playing games on NG and screwing around with flash. Feels like a completely different world at this point. Glad they're still around, and I love that they're running events like this to remember the good old days.

Same here, I was sure it had shut down. I'm glad I was wrong.

I remember looking at the source of some fla files and scratching my head trying to understand the actionscript. The cool shit people could do really motivated me to become a programmer. If anyone involved in making this possible is reading this, I love you for your amazing work, thank you!

Is there an open source tool to make flash games/animations? I only ever hear of adobe stuff

Haven't done that in a long while but you used to be able to use Haxe as a compiler in combination of tools like swfmill converting and importing resources. Targeting flash was actually one of them primary usecases when haxe was initially released.

It's a bit different workflow than what the adobe tooling provides and in no ways a replacement for adobe animation tooling, but for a more programmer oriented workflow especially if you are using sprite based graphics it's not bad.

There was also FlashDevelop and later HaxeDevelop as IDEs (.NET based) that integrated the corresponding tooling. Both seem currently unmaintained. If you are on windows you might still be able to run the old builds. Otherwise for non flash based projects the vscode haxe extension is quite good, but might need a bit more manual build scripts for the flash stuff compared to prime time of FlashDevelop.

Well I don't exactly want flash as a platform, I just want a similar vector animation experience, raster graphics are not that

I think Synfig might work in that case.

Thanks, I'll check it out. Looking at the website, it looks promising

Flash is proprietary(#), so nobody bothered. When I contributed to Ruffle I think buying a second hand Adobe Flash Professional CS 6 was the recommended way. Also some subscriptions that you can buy from Adobe cover producing Flash format.

(#)Some exclusions exist which made Ruffle possible (for example https://github.com/adobe/avmplus is open sourced) but it's not like everything is fully open.

mxlmc in the Apache Flex Compilers will do both. I used it before adobe gave it to apache for flash games/apps. It worked just fine.

It's also possible to do animations that way, but it'd be better to use something geared toward animation. Tupitube (formerly ktoon) supports swf, I think. But, it looks dead.

https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/flex/site/branches/flexdoc/...

The last web archive if the site went down for you too.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250818232649/https://www.newgr...

The site is blocked in some countries, could be why it appears down for some.

Flash is now the retro gaming console of web 1.0

This just made me feel really old.

Yeah that headline made me feel really old and the above thought just popped into my head. Flash games remind me of my Atari 2600 in certain nostalgic ways.

And like retro consoles, Flash has a thriving preservation community with projects like Ruffle, Flashpoint, and the Internet Archive's Flash collection ensuring this cultural heritage remains playable despite the original technology being obsolete.

This Win98 experience is great:

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/977308

Honestly why hasn't there been a flash-like competitor or alternative that has filled the gap of creatives being able to quickly produce content and distribute it easily on the internet? I think the HTML5 folks envisioned <audio/> and <canvas/> being all you need for interactive stuff, but that hasn't really come to fruition. For animated content, is it perhaps YouTube that took over?

I think kids just jumped onto Unreal, Unity and Blender instead of bothering with 2d.

I'm always amused by this question.

There is, it's called Adobe Animate, its what they rebranded Flash as, it's literally the same thing. It exports straight to Canvas and WebGL using the create.js libraries. [0]

Basically the online advertising space had a collective heart attack when Flash was suddenly deprecated because they used Flash for all their banner animations. Adobe tried to replace Flash with Edge [1], which was one of the slowest and buggiest program I ever used. It didn't last long.

[0] https://createjs.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Edge

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