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)
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 37.1 ms ] threadI 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 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
I wrote a bit about it: https://austinhenley.com/blog/8lessons8games.html
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.
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/977308
https://web.archive.org/web/20250818232649/https://www.newgr...
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'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/...
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