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Newgrounds: Flash Forward 2025
- cobbzilla 1y agoFlash is now the retro gaming console of web 1.0
- King-Aaron 1y agoThis just made me feel really old.
- cobbzilla 1y agoYeah 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.
- ethan_smith 1y agoAnd 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.
- tyleo 1y agoI spent a lot of my childhood on Newgrounds. I’m happy to see it alive and kicking.
- silisili 1y agoSame. That's a name I hadn't seen or even thought about for 25 years. Amazed it's still going.
- firefax 1y agoNewgrounds 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico%27s_School
- waltbosz 1y agoI 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.
- firefax 1y agoThere 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.
- tetris11 1y agohttps://www.newgrounds.com/tubby/wired.html https://www.newgrounds.com/tubby/wired.html There's a press section, but nothing directly from the BBC
- firefax 1y agoThis simply states "This file is hosted on Newgrounds.com"
- tetris11 1y agoweird, seems to work for me But try the parent directory
- SnuffBox 1y agoIt's probably because of referrers, opened it in an incognito window and it worked just fine.
- firefax 1y agohttps://www.newgrounds.com/tubby/netfreedom.html 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?
- azhenley 1y agoNewgrounds, 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 https://austinhenley.com/blog/8lessons8games.html
- seneca 1y agoPerhaps 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.
- riffraff 1y agoSame here, I was sure it had shut down. I'm glad I was wrong.
- redundantly 1y agoThis Win98 experience is great: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/977308 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/977308
- Brajeshwar 1y agoThe last web archive if the site went down for you too. https://web.archive.org/web/20250818232649/https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1542140 https://web.archive.org/web/20250818232649/https://www.newgr...
- sunnybeetroot 1y agoThe site is blocked in some countries, could be why it appears down for some.
- Animats 1y agoAw. 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.)
- praptak 1y agoIt 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).
- noosphr 1y agoWith chrome we went from having a plugin that's abused for malvertising to a whole browser. Google can't die fast enough.
- extraduder_ire 1y agoDropped? They started requiring you to log in and toggle a setting to show them a few years ago.
- MitPitt 1y agoMeet and- HUH?
- SnuffBox 1y agoI'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.
- firefax 1y agoI hope the Brothers Chaps do something similar to resurrect Homestar Runner.
- BrenBarn 1y agoAlways 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.
- Unirely01 1y ago[dead]
- mattigames 1y agoA 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.
- acron0 1y agoReminds me of https://discussions.unity.com/t/uniswf-flash-to-unity/481812 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.
- weberer 1y agoHow about Godot? You can actually fork that since its open-source.
- krapp 1y agoThat'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.
- hofrogs 1y agoIs there an open source tool to make flash games/animations? I only ever hear of adobe stuff
- Karliss 1y agoHaven'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.
- praptak 1y agoFlash 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 https://github.com/adobe/avmplus is open sourced) but it's not like everything is fully open.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- patates 1y agoI 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!
- bradhe 1y agoHonestly 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?
- klondike_klive 1y agoI think kids just jumped onto Unreal, Unity and Blender instead of bothering with 2d.
- user____name 1y agoI'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/ https://createjs.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Edge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Edge