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207 - Newgrounds and Flash Games (Patreon)

Published:
2025-09-17 06:00:08
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Downloads

Content

The lads boot up Newgrounds and take The Impossible Quiz as they dive into the bizarre and labyrinthine world of the bread and butter of the Web 2.0: Flash Games. Topics include the origins of Newgrounds, the boundless creativity (and trolling) of the flash scene, and what it means to be the lead gay technician of one of the most influential flash games of all time.

Media Referenced in this Episode:

The Games:

Pico’s School by Tom Fulp

SimGirls by sim-man

N by Metanet Software

The Crimson Room by Toshimitsu Takagi

Bloons TD by Ninja Kiwi

The Impossible Quiz by Splapp-me-do

Nanaca Crash! By Unknown

Canabalt by Adam Saltsman

Robot Unicorn Attack by Spititonin Media Games

Newgrounds Wiki - TomFulp

From the IAmA community on Reddit: Tom Fulp

Newgrounds Wiki - History

How Flash games shaped the video game industry by Jonas Richner. Flashgamehistory.com.

Flashpoint Archive

TWOAPW theme by Brendan Dalton: Patreon // brendan-dalton.com // brendandalton.bandcamp.comInterstitial: “Pages 13-21 of ‘The Hidden Enemy’” // Written and Performed by Josh Boerman // Music by Wendy Carlos

Files

Comments

GIfSmooth

If you're not talking about Meet N' Fuck: Kingdom, I'm not interested

Zipzapzop

Brian promotes the Canadian education system?!

Pineneedles

I think i’m too young to know a lot of the websites mentioned in this episode. But i do remember spending a lot of time on websites that were named some combination of girls and games - and also friv and Y8.

Zipzapzop

Man dog sees god sucks so hard

P.A.L.

I played the shit put of those games when I was in school. Never on Newgrounds though. Either notdoppler.com for when I was in secondary school and armorgames.com for college. Not the best thing for my grades...

P.A.L.

"And Barry Allen's Mom is alive" AJ, I just want to say that was a very stealth joke but I appreciated the hell out of it.

By Tove!

I was homeschooled from 5th-10th grades, and I think it was abominable for my socialization. Middle school sucks, but not having established peer relationships going into high school is even worse imo

Ajusco Huerta

Maybe its a culture thing but I've seen more SNK machines in Morelia, Mexico than anywhere in the US. God knows how many pesos and hours I spent at those machines.

Aliyah T

I was born in 1999 and lived at the edge of a small town that didn't get high speed Internet until, like, 2014. I have many memories of having to go out with my parents but leaving a dress up flash game from Azalea's Dolls, or Rinmaru, or DollDivine, or Deviantart so they would be loaded and ready to play by the time I got back home.

Aliyah T

Let me tell you, it was a real Ong's Hat being 10 with dyslexia and having to memorize how to spell the username Hapuriainen so I could find her Deviantart games 😔

I Love Brian Alford's Bible Corner

2005: Man, Teen Girl Squad is hilarious! I can't imagine what the Internet will be like in 20 years! 2025: Man, Teen Girl Squad is hilarious but I gotta go grade AI-generated essays now.

P.A.L.

Also, NGL, I'd fucking love an episode from you guys on the Yakuza franchise

Tidypotamia

so incredibly glad you included nanaca crash, going to go play it some more

chronicles of girldick

My experience with Newgrounds in the 2000s was I knew there was hentai there and didn't realise there were other sites that just like yknow collected and displayed hentai, so to see it I went and played some bullshit tetris games to unlock a picture of a single titty

yonder

stoked about this ep. i was revered like a wizard at my rural Texas school for granting people access to albinoblacksheep via proxy on our ag barn computer

Frankie Guido

Mentioned my two favorite game series in one sentence. PLEASE do Yakuza at some point.

Em Gravesong

I am genuinely surprised to hear Ed McMillen referenced, but *not* The Binding of Isaac.

Derek W

1639.89m first run

Melody

On the tower defense topic, a lot of those actually got their starts in StarCraft 1-2 and Warcraft 3 custom multiplayer game modes. I saw them trickle into independent newly posted flash games like Bubble TD, Bloons TD, and Gemcraft TD games on Newgrounds after months of being in WC3 multiplayer games with the same mechanics of building mazes with towers, waves of different enemy types, different tower abilities, and the like. The single player versions dominate now, but they used to be like competitive Tetris where succeeding on your maze would make things harder for your opponents and you won when the opponent stopped being able to keep up. Those custom game modes are where a lot of other Indy multiplayer devs figured out things like arena battles like DOTA, which was a port of a WC3 game mode.

Anthony Pugliese

AddictingGames.com!!! We could get to it in our middle school computer lab somehow

t o r t

Love this nostalgia bomb of an episode. Homestuck episode when?????

Derek W

FUCKING 19499.55m (yes this is what I did at work today)

Anghellik9

I was born in 1991, and I spent an immense amount of my time as a young teen on Newgrounds at friends houses, because we still had dialup. Very excited for this one nostalgia nuke.

Evan Hawkins

A Machine for Pigs; A Shirt for Josh

BarFly

According to Josh Fruhlinger aka The Comics Curmudgeon, the female characters in BC were renamed sometime in the last decade (2019 says Wikipedia) to Grace and Jane but yes, for 61 years including the entire tenure of the late religious weirdo Johnny Hart, they were called "The Cute Chick" and "The Fat Broad"

AngryOldManYaddaYadda

I enjoyed this episode, but I had to leave halfway through to pick up a load of shoes in Verdammter Platz.

Hugh Kearney

Gotta love the use of the Tron soundtrack in the interstitial.

Erik

My personal favorite product of this milieu is definitely 'Which Way Adventure' or the Manticore Game. A pretty simple point and click adventure game, with an intense dedication to a single bit.

Nick Gully

I quit a job over ActionScript 2.0, it was a garbage language.

Deya

can't wait for the madness combat episode, a silly hyperviolent flash animation that is somehow by grace of gods still going

John Benfield

That and candystand.com were perpetually open on pretty much every computer in both the computer lab and the library when I was in high school.

Mark Schwagner

Sean Kingston never recovered financially from the devastation of the Shorty Fires Burning on the Dance Floor. Look it up! "Rapper Sean Kingston sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for wire fraud"

The Best Sean

There was an old website called rrrrthats5rs that is nothing but flash games designed to screw with you in some way. Also I was sure tower defenses came from Warcraft 3 custom maps

erika

Same here, and it worked into high school! They must've blocked it in the mid '00s. We only managed to scrounge up a page with the helicopter game after that, so that's all we did for a while in the computer lab.

SweetChinMusik

I got the erasure always single on cd in my car that has 3 eurodance remixes. Everytime I play it I can see the robot unicorn in my head.

Gary McCammon

I think Josh hit on something, and it's too bad it was at the end of the pod because I'd like to hear your ideas on this, but - I think the reason everything sucks lately is exactly profit is superior to quality. A crap product sold cheap is more profitable than a quality one. Capitalism and competition were supposed to improve things, but actually it's just left us hip-deep in shit.

Grumblestank

Pitfall! erasure, the OG endless runner (I guess more like 20min runner) but still

Tom Hauptman

Names that are also verbs you say, like Alford? Are we not counting turret defense custom maps from StarCraft and Warcraft as tower defense games?

Grumblestank

Any kongregate or miniclip fans? Also the Post cereal website was one of our favorite in school because it got past the blockers lol

Jonathan V. Cann

I guess the Emogame series was never on Newgrounds? I never played (or really even saw) any other Flash games outside the computer lab, and everything in there tended to be knockoff Marios--like, literally somebody remaking Mario 1 in Flash

Nathan Woods

There's actually some moderately interesting study happening about the linguistic impacts of algorithmic censorship, like how "unalive" started on tiktok out of necessity, but then became so common on that app that it permeated the vocabulary of regular users.

John Benfield

Were there really no tower defense games on consoles in the early days? I agree that Space Invaders & Missile Command don't count, but I consider the awful Fort Condor segment in FFVII to be my first exposure to the genre.

Adi

Citrix? ThinClient?? What is this…. A hospital???

Meadowlark-Lemonist

I had no idea you could save flash games locally and I was the computer kid in my grade. Crazy.

Elliecat

This site doesn't get talked about nearly enough but the folks that were making games for armor games were probably some of the most talented people in the space. i have huge affection for John Cooney's (jmtb02) work; he made the achievement unlocked games, elephant quest, elephant rave, and epic combo among others. Chris "Con" Condon (operating under the name "Con Artist" made the game that angry birds presumably ripped off "Crash the Castle" and "Crash the Castle 2" and made The zombie defense shooter "The Last Stand" which had 3 sequels one of which is a multi hour 2d side scrolling RPG shooter made entirely in flash that had a had hand in inspiring COD: WAW's Nazi zombies mode! "A few hours after talking to Dan about doing the extra content, I was taking to one of our designers, Sean Slayback, about tower defense games and the proposal to make one. He mentioned a game called “The Last Stand“, which is a flash game where you play as a survivor fighting off zombies. Zombies run towards you and start tearing at a large barricade that is protecting your area. If they break through, you’re pretty much toast, so you move around in your little section of the screen shooting various guns to try to keep them from breaking in. The rules are pretty standard for a tower defense game but with some cool twists. After every round, you get some points which you can spend on building back your barricade, looking for survivors, and looking for new weapons. So depending on how you play, you might choose to get a new weapon, or more people to help you defend, or simply build up your defenses. So, I played a few rounds and had a huge epiphany. “Zombie Nazis!” I thought to myself. You could do a lot of the same stuff here, but make it more interactive and more intense in the first person. What you you could actually buy barricades in real time? What if you actually could find and buy weapons in the level? What if you could unlock new areas that changed the strategy of the game and the flow of the enemies? Plus you could play in co-op! We have zombie-like animations already (the dazed guys), this is a no-brainier prototype! The engine supported all these ideas and I could immediately see how they could be implemented. I immediately rushed over to Dan’s office. “Hey, so I have this idea, I think it’s going to be awesome. Let’s do a tower defense game where zombies are attacking a building you’re holed up in!” You could tell that he wasn’t sold on the idea. I gave him my pitch anyway but he wasn’t terribly impressed, even after showing him “The Last Stand”. He told me we wouldn’t have enough time to make it, doing such a game mode would require all new assets, it’d be a huge risk, the mode didn’t fit the theme of the game at all plus it would be too campy. However, when I started pitching the idea to others on the team, they seemed to love it, especially some guys that had played a lot of WarCraft or StarCraft and knew a lot about tower defense games (those blizzard game were where the Tower Defense craze got really popular)." -Jessie Snyder; Treyarch Developer and Creator of Nazi Zombies. from his Blog post "Nazi Zombies, Ray Guns and Magic Chests" November 11, 2008 https://www.jessesnyder.org/trenches/?p=42

Elizabeth Power

I appreciate the old movie scoring that you have added to The Hidden Enemy!

OfficialPunGuy

With the covering of flash games, my dream of a Bionicle episode has crept ever so slightly closer to

Universally Idiotic

Yeah, I remember being early in transition in 2018, and deciding to look up some flash games and I found out that the creator of :the game: series also transitioned, and it was a moment I still think about quite a bit.

Tuesdays

brb making a second patreon account to subscribe again in memory of the triangle shortywaist factory fire

Mutual Aid Miniatures

Didn't they have those excellent Dogfight games & Seppukuties too?

Mutual Aid Miniatures

Tower Defense didn't really take off until Starcraft Mods & Flash Games.

Mutual Aid Miniatures

The flash game megathread on Something Awful forums was a repository of hidden gems.

StephieF

I played pretty much all of these too lol. I got around the blocks on my school computers by using firefox installed on a USB drive. My friends and I played a ton of neopets that way too.

StephieF

Also please please please do an episode about the animations too! There were so many iconic ones! Both on Newgrounds and their own websites (legendary frog, bitey of brackenwood, neurotically yours, homestar, rathergood, weeblstuff, etc)

Ceru

The Hidden Enemy is the Pico’s School of the Left