I remember playing a crap web game in college, kinda like gunslinger, where you try to shoot people who turn around with a gun (and not those without). When I graduated college, Ian--one of my good friends at work--ended up being one of those guys in the game! Turns out that game I was playing was built by Tom Fulp, and he was using his friends (like Ian) as characters in his games pre-Newgrounds. All that messing around with crap games on the internet paid off. He had started Newgrounds while in college, and had quit to do it.
Met Tom once, and he was a cool guy, but he didn't believe in the stuff that they taught in CS. He had a long rant about how learning string diff algorithms were useless. Anyway, it turns out later on, he went back to college to finish his degree. When his classmate(s) found out who he was, this one kid was so excited to sit next to him. "Do you know who he is?!" he would exclaim to his professor, to Tom's embarrassment. I wonder if he had to do string diff algos when he went back to finish college.
Haha, nice to see this pop back up. I used to live on this site, making Flash games, chatting on the forums, and as a member of the Clock Crew. Some of my games were fairly popular at the time, including Proximity and some Clock Crew themed games.
I also made (with Rob as the artist) the first commissioned game for what would eventually be the really popular Armor Games site. When he got started he was wanting to do LOTR themed games and was calling his site Games of Gondor, but he didn't stick with it long probably because of legal reasons. It was called Save The Ring!
It's cool to see how far Ruffle has come in making flash games playable without flash. Was able to go check out a flash game I uploaded 15 years ago on here, and it's completely playable now, when I just assumed it was gone forever. There's so much content on Newgrounds and similar sites that isn't lost to time because of it, makes me want to go spend a few hours reliving the olden days.
A Ruffle anecdote: I know websites ship Ruffle, but I've also had the Firefox extension installed for some old sites that do not. I recently had to disable it because it made Twitch claim that my browser is too old to use their website. I'm assuming they check for Flash support, and somehow that trumps everything else they use to identify the browser version. Pretty pathetic, honestly.
Almost brings a tear to my eye to see they still have all the games and stupid Flash animations I submitted as a middle schooler, hacking around with his friends going on 25 years ago, just hoping not to get “blammed”. I’m sure these days kids are doing the same in Roblox or Minecraft or whatever - maybe it’s the same, but it feels so much more commercial than the heyday of Newgrounds. A special time to have been online for sure.
I remember spending so many hours playing little flash games on Newgrounds and other sites like it in lower secondary school during the breaks. Running up to the library room where the computers where, to get the most amount of computer time squeezed into the short and long breaks.
For a while, my class teacher had me banned from using the computers because she said I shouldn’t use every break to just run to the computers. Maybe she was right that it wasn’t completely healthy. But it’s not like I was alone in running to them, my friends did too, and even though I may have been particularly excited to use the computers I still did things together with my friends both in front of those computers and other socialising with them after school etc.
yeah I bought it for Ps3 way back in the day. mindblowing seeing that on PSN when some 6 years prior I was playing it in the middle school computer lab.
Spent insane amounts of time on Newgrounds back in the day, still watch some of the classics (tank men, ultimate showdown, metal gear awesome, etc etc) from time to time. A different internet back then.
I never got to actually be on newgrounds, when I was 8 to 14 years old I didn't understand much english so I was always playing newgrounds games but off sites, it's only later that I understood that most of it was from the same community!
So fun to see my music (created when I was 15 years old) is still sitting there! Sadly though my flash animations (that were 'blammed'[0] almost immediately) aren't there, which I wish I could find somehow.
Nice to see Newgrounds is still alive and more or less unchanged since its early days. With so many of the creative spaces online becoming highly censored hellholes, having a more laissez-faire platform is a breath of fresh air.
One of the worst cultural developments of this century has been creative people becoming censorship-hungry prudes. There is a certain romanticism about being anti-establishment, but then they became the establishment and couldn’t figure out what to do next.
I think you're blaming the wrong people. Most of the censorship I've seen is coming from ad funded platforms wanting to please corporations. Independent artists create all kinds of offensive content.
Unless you mean that there is less slurs and jokes against minorities, which is an improvement tbh.
No doubt the platforms are a problem too, but I was referring to the creatives themselves. Just a few examples I can remember.
In 2020 dozens of Hachette employees walked out over the publisher’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir. Hachette cancelled the book.
Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.
Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.
John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.
Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.
The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.
I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
> Unless you mean that there is less slurs and jokes against minorities, which is an improvement tbh.
Censorship is bad unless I agree with it. Then it’s good. Stunning levels of thought and reason.
Bill Lawrence removed episodes because he and the cast hated that for years after they'd see people at halloween dressing as the characters in blackface, and realised that people were taking the wrong message from the episodes they'd made which were meant to mock the idea of people thinking it was OK to do blackface.
That isn't self-censorship, it's accepting that your work didn't read the way you wanted it to and deciding it's not worth having it out there under your name any more.
Freedom of speech also includes the freedom not to speak, and people should be allowed to say "I don't like this work of mine any more, I'm not continuing to publish it". If you advocate for enforced speech, you are the censor, just using a different tool.
> That isn't self-censorship, it's accepting that your work didn't read the way you wanted it to and deciding it's not worth having it out there under your name any more.
You are confused about the definition of the word censor:
> [to prevent part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/censor)
I understand Lawrence has reasons for his calls for censorship. All censorious people have reasons for their demands. They are still calls for censorship. Lawrence is free to not speak. He's even free to demand that media be censored. No one has argued otherwise.
TV self-censored for years. Elvis was unfit for family viewing. Punks wouldn’t share stages with racists and ejected National Front supporters from gigs. Rock against Racism was founded partly in response to Eric Clapton’s pro-Enoch Powell racist remarks. Dead Kennedeys were not exactly coy about where they drew the line.
If you want medical analogies for COVID, AIDS disinformation is perfect. ACT UP and similar AIDS movements would have laughed you out of creative spaces for bringing misinformation about how AIDS was spread.
If you have ChatGPT tokens going spare, you can ask it for a balanced view of historical artistic deplatforming and self-censoring. I asked mine and, in classic one-liner machine-slop dunk, it said…
“The argument sounds like it is being made by someone under 40 who believes they’re living through a unique historical decline but refuses to read a book, or someone over 40 who missed the world around them. Ask them which they are.”
Elvis wasn't the one calling for censorship. It was religious viewers - the audience.
I'm not denying that there were examples of creatives - like punks - who called for censorship. I'm describing a massive shift in scale and scope.
I did as you suggested because it's important to have a broad and balanced view of the issues. I used the query "Do you believe the scale and scope of creatives calling for censorship is worse, better, or the same today as it was 50 years ago? Provide a detailed response but summarise with one sentence at the end." I used Sol 5.6 Extra High (I'm deliberately avoiding Sol 6 right now due to some issues with hallucinations). I have a system prompt which emphasises accuracy and citations over speed.
I won't paste the entire passage (Hacker News bans and/or rate limits accounts which do that), but I will paste the summary. Note that I've read the analysis in full, and while I am more informed now, it has not changed my opinion.
> "On the specific question of creatives themselves calling for lawful expression to be suppressed, removed or deplatformed, I think the evidence points to it being broader in scope and probably more common today than 50 years ago, although formal government censorship was in some respects more coercive then."
Feel free to ask your research model the same question. I would encourage you to use a better paid model with careful system prompt, direction, and effort. Your model sounds like a petulant teenager.
““use a better paid model” as an argument from authority is magnificent. We’ve somehow reinvented “my dad can beat up your dad,” except our dads are inference-time budgets”.
So there’s that.
Getting back to human responses; it’s hard to argue your robot’s conclusion when it only got to a weak “probably” while comparing the communication environments of 1980’s (no social media) and 2026 (very much social media). Lots more people with lots bigger platforms dealing with lots more voices on what should/shouldn’t be tolerated -> perceived increase in volume of censorship by both audience and other creatives (themselves taking role of both audience and performer playing to their own audience)
Elvis may not have been calling to censor himself, but the hosts and producers (themselves creatives) followed the demands of the audience - surely at least a somewhat close analogy to creatives amplifying the voices of their audiences today?
To get a bit better than your model’s “probably”, maybe we should shoot for specifics. If we agree there was a “dark past” where government and religious pressure created artistic censorship to comparable levels to today, and if I concede to move the argument forward that we’re in “historical decline” now. Where specifically do you put the beginning and end of the “golden age”?
The dark past could of course overlap with the start of the subsequent decline, creating not a golden age but a shit age, centered maybe on the late 80s.
It seems entirely disingenuous to tell me to investigate this in earnest and ask ChatGPT for answers, then dismiss it when it didn't give you the answer you wanted. I gave you the model, the effort level, the query, and the summary, which you could use to confirm what I write. I note that you haven't tested this yourself - ostensibly because you know it will return something similar. Further, you either didn't read my comments or are attempting to straw man them, because I have not stated nor argued that religious and government censorship is equivalent today. I also find the implication in your final question absurd. There is no way to place chronological boxes around cultural change. They are not binary, and I do not believe you think they are.
Your comment is dishonesty wrapped in condescension, and it's clear that you never intended to have any kind of earnest discussion here.
In 2020 dozens of Hachette employees walked out over the publisher’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir. Hachette cancelled the book.
Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.
Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.
John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.
Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.
The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.
I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
Time to play some Nuclear Eagle. It's a game where you're a momma eagle feeding your chicks. Except you're giant and feed them people. And people don't like being eaten, so it has some GTA-style escalation.
Maybe just nostalgia talking, but the height of Newgrounds really seemed like a golden age for light gaming. The shift to mobile games has just resulted in a large number of gambling simulators, which I'm sure has been a key reason for the popularity of Kalshi, Polymarket, etc.
I'd say the shift to mobile went through a similar arc into decline as the web, actually.
Newgrounds really was the golden age for web gaming. And, similar to early web, early mobile gaming also started out with nostalgia-worthy charm and heart. You're right that it's been hollowed out, but the same thing happened to web gaming after the Flash era. The social casino era is maybe its 6th reinvention, and its lowest yet.
Now that mobile gaming has been raced to the bottom and consolidated (and thanks to the dual tailwinds of AI making it easy to write code without engines and the web maturing in its 3d+networking capabilities) we're started to see a resurgence of web-based games - it's my full-time job now! Granted we still do rely on mobile apps (as web wrappers) for monetization, but that wall is crumbling rapidly.
Would you share who you're working for? I'm looking for a switch to web game development, I already have some experience with it but I did lost all the hope that the web was still the platform where to play some games
The crazy thing is there was a period between Newgrounds games and mobile games: Facebook games. It was so popular at that moment and so insignificant hindsight that we barely remember it.
That seems a reach to say the popularity of kalshi and polymarket is down to gambling simulators.
Id wager (heh) that it's much more down to a lack of regulation combined with the normalisation of influencer driven get rich quick but pretend it's clever investing that exploded in popularity with crypto and wallstreetbets style influencer investing. Combine that with house prices being where they are and people get risky with investing as their hope outstrips their caution.
I don't think a few rounds of balatro or slotomania leads to that.
that's quite a reach. much more obviously, the shift to mobile games has resulted in predatory pay2win "micro"transactions and ads everywhere. the last time I'd tried to find something new to play on the shitter, seemingly every random game I got from the playstore wanted an AAA's worth of $ to unlock features and/or was full of ads. and they weren't even those coomer bait gachas everyone with half a brain knows to avoid.
i dont think its the sites. people always blame the sites. but people became lazy and hungry for dopamine. they arent creating cool stuff anymore but almost get upset or withdrawl if someone else dont shove something 'new and exciting' down their throats
internet is not the only thin that suffers it. TV, music, its the same. Listen to what kids played music ,movies, toys etc. in 60, 70, 80, 90s up to today. you will see very sharp changes, first in how they occupy themselves and then in how they shape society -_- for their kids to go into the next dumbing down cycle.
(yes v cynical and black n white put. easier to word)
Gambling aside, the median quality of a modern mobile game is worse than what we had on newgrounds.
NG didn't have multiple 500MB downloads, buttons in the wrong place, pointless currencies. More importantly NG artists actually cared. I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.
> I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.
WebAssembly is better compilation target and runtime than Flash ever was. Many languages can compile to WebAssembly.
I think what you want is an authoring tool like Flash. Why not make that tool? Or if you don't want to make it, Rive's a pretty good animation engine. You can make games with it:
Assuming you're not looking at the file sizes involved...
SWF is extremely compact, since it was intended to be used over a dialup connection. Flash worked because the player was preinstalled on the computer.
The newer Ruffle player is a 10MB download in addition to the actual flash file. You get a new freshly downloaded copy of Ruffle from every site that's hosting Flash content.
> Wasn't the main reason that it was really difficult to keep the sandbox secure?
It basically ran JavaScript. It's no harder to sandbox Flash than it's to sandbox any HTML5 website. Arguably much easier because there was no JIT back then. Flash also ran in an enclosed box on a website and had no access to DOM, which greatly lowers attack surface.
It peaked and went on a decline in the period before companies were snatching up sites just to merge their user bases.
Had newgrounds continued into the 2010's, it would've been bought by Google to boost Google Wave / Circles / Plus whatever, and then it would've been actually shutdown.
So its age is actually what helped it survive I suspect.
I used to play flash games on this site, one of my favorites was "William and Sly" and also "William and Sly 2".
You can still play them now, they ported it away from flash - which still offered experiences that we are just now beginning to match natively in terms of web gaming and video generation.
What a treat to see this pop up here. I used to be obsessed with Madness flash shorts back in the day. Got me into Flash and web tooling in general. A testament to the prime 2000s web.
Comments (88)
Met Tom once, and he was a cool guy, but he didn't believe in the stuff that they taught in CS. He had a long rant about how learning string diff algorithms were useless. Anyway, it turns out later on, he went back to college to finish his degree. When his classmate(s) found out who he was, this one kid was so excited to sit next to him. "Do you know who he is?!" he would exclaim to his professor, to Tom's embarrassment. I wonder if he had to do string diff algos when he went back to finish college.
I also made (with Rob as the artist) the first commissioned game for what would eventually be the really popular Armor Games site. When he got started he was wanting to do LOTR themed games and was calling his site Games of Gondor, but he didn't stick with it long probably because of legal reasons. It was called Save The Ring!
Here's my user profile, same name as I am on here: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/
Even the same old games are still there
And a legendary one at that!
I remember spending so many hours playing little flash games on Newgrounds and other sites like it in lower secondary school during the breaks. Running up to the library room where the computers where, to get the most amount of computer time squeezed into the short and long breaks.
For a while, my class teacher had me banned from using the computers because she said I shouldn’t use every break to just run to the computers. Maybe she was right that it wasn’t completely healthy. But it’s not like I was alone in running to them, my friends did too, and even though I may have been particularly excited to use the computers I still did things together with my friends both in front of those computers and other socialising with them after school etc.
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/301341
https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/201982
That was the creepiest thing ever when it came out.
Rusty spoons.
https://fat-pie.com/
And I am saddened to this day that no one I've worked with professionally has gotten the reference. One day.
Looking up my user, kind of embarrassing to see comments from 22 years ago asking and giving code advice.
However, it does raise lots of nostalgia for the BBS era.
[0] - https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/599831
Unless you mean that there is less slurs and jokes against minorities, which is an improvement tbh.
In 2020 dozens of Hachette employees walked out over the publisher’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir. Hachette cancelled the book.
Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.
Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.
John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.
Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.
The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.
I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
> Unless you mean that there is less slurs and jokes against minorities, which is an improvement tbh.
Censorship is bad unless I agree with it. Then it’s good. Stunning levels of thought and reason.
That isn't self-censorship, it's accepting that your work didn't read the way you wanted it to and deciding it's not worth having it out there under your name any more.
Freedom of speech also includes the freedom not to speak, and people should be allowed to say "I don't like this work of mine any more, I'm not continuing to publish it". If you advocate for enforced speech, you are the censor, just using a different tool.
You are confused about the definition of the word censor:
> [to prevent part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/censor)
I understand Lawrence has reasons for his calls for censorship. All censorious people have reasons for their demands. They are still calls for censorship. Lawrence is free to not speak. He's even free to demand that media be censored. No one has argued otherwise.
Cool, I asked my computer mommy and got about 200,000 examples of creatives demanding less censorship
If you want medical analogies for COVID, AIDS disinformation is perfect. ACT UP and similar AIDS movements would have laughed you out of creative spaces for bringing misinformation about how AIDS was spread.
If you have ChatGPT tokens going spare, you can ask it for a balanced view of historical artistic deplatforming and self-censoring. I asked mine and, in classic one-liner machine-slop dunk, it said…
“The argument sounds like it is being made by someone under 40 who believes they’re living through a unique historical decline but refuses to read a book, or someone over 40 who missed the world around them. Ask them which they are.”
I'm not denying that there were examples of creatives - like punks - who called for censorship. I'm describing a massive shift in scale and scope.
I did as you suggested because it's important to have a broad and balanced view of the issues. I used the query "Do you believe the scale and scope of creatives calling for censorship is worse, better, or the same today as it was 50 years ago? Provide a detailed response but summarise with one sentence at the end." I used Sol 5.6 Extra High (I'm deliberately avoiding Sol 6 right now due to some issues with hallucinations). I have a system prompt which emphasises accuracy and citations over speed.
I won't paste the entire passage (Hacker News bans and/or rate limits accounts which do that), but I will paste the summary. Note that I've read the analysis in full, and while I am more informed now, it has not changed my opinion.
> "On the specific question of creatives themselves calling for lawful expression to be suppressed, removed or deplatformed, I think the evidence points to it being broader in scope and probably more common today than 50 years ago, although formal government censorship was in some respects more coercive then."
Feel free to ask your research model the same question. I would encourage you to use a better paid model with careful system prompt, direction, and effort. Your model sounds like a petulant teenager.
““use a better paid model” as an argument from authority is magnificent. We’ve somehow reinvented “my dad can beat up your dad,” except our dads are inference-time budgets”.
So there’s that.
Getting back to human responses; it’s hard to argue your robot’s conclusion when it only got to a weak “probably” while comparing the communication environments of 1980’s (no social media) and 2026 (very much social media). Lots more people with lots bigger platforms dealing with lots more voices on what should/shouldn’t be tolerated -> perceived increase in volume of censorship by both audience and other creatives (themselves taking role of both audience and performer playing to their own audience)
Elvis may not have been calling to censor himself, but the hosts and producers (themselves creatives) followed the demands of the audience - surely at least a somewhat close analogy to creatives amplifying the voices of their audiences today?
To get a bit better than your model’s “probably”, maybe we should shoot for specifics. If we agree there was a “dark past” where government and religious pressure created artistic censorship to comparable levels to today, and if I concede to move the argument forward that we’re in “historical decline” now. Where specifically do you put the beginning and end of the “golden age”?
Your comment is dishonesty wrapped in condescension, and it's clear that you never intended to have any kind of earnest discussion here.
Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.
Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.
John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.
Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.
The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.
I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
I really wish that will never happen. For now it produces crappy clones of existing games
Newgrounds really was the golden age for web gaming. And, similar to early web, early mobile gaming also started out with nostalgia-worthy charm and heart. You're right that it's been hollowed out, but the same thing happened to web gaming after the Flash era. The social casino era is maybe its 6th reinvention, and its lowest yet.
Now that mobile gaming has been raced to the bottom and consolidated (and thanks to the dual tailwinds of AI making it easy to write code without engines and the web maturing in its 3d+networking capabilities) we're started to see a resurgence of web-based games - it's my full-time job now! Granted we still do rely on mobile apps (as web wrappers) for monetization, but that wall is crumbling rapidly.
The games were more polished by the time, but still quite wild.
Id wager (heh) that it's much more down to a lack of regulation combined with the normalisation of influencer driven get rich quick but pretend it's clever investing that exploded in popularity with crypto and wallstreetbets style influencer investing. Combine that with house prices being where they are and people get risky with investing as their hope outstrips their caution.
I don't think a few rounds of balatro or slotomania leads to that.
internet is not the only thin that suffers it. TV, music, its the same. Listen to what kids played music ,movies, toys etc. in 60, 70, 80, 90s up to today. you will see very sharp changes, first in how they occupy themselves and then in how they shape society -_- for their kids to go into the next dumbing down cycle.
(yes v cynical and black n white put. easier to word)
NG didn't have multiple 500MB downloads, buttons in the wrong place, pointless currencies. More importantly NG artists actually cared. I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.
WebAssembly is better compilation target and runtime than Flash ever was. Many languages can compile to WebAssembly.
I think what you want is an authoring tool like Flash. Why not make that tool? Or if you don't want to make it, Rive's a pretty good animation engine. You can make games with it:
https://rive.app/
https://rive.app/docs/scripting/demos
SWF is extremely compact, since it was intended to be used over a dialup connection. Flash worked because the player was preinstalled on the computer.
The newer Ruffle player is a 10MB download in addition to the actual flash file. You get a new freshly downloaded copy of Ruffle from every site that's hosting Flash content.
The internet has very much moved on.
A three minute, 1080p YouTube music video encoded in AV1 video with Opus audio is 30 megabytes. No one bats an eyelash at downloading that.
To prove it, this one has been downloaded 2.6 billion times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekr2nIex040
To even further prove it, this one has been downloaded 17 billion times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w
In retrospect, it turns out the reasons were a load of bollocks. Modern web is 10 times more bloated than Flash ever was, and nobody cares.
Thank God we made the web so much safer!!
There's at least one industry that reaaaaally got fucked with the sunsetting of Flash: e learning
It basically ran JavaScript. It's no harder to sandbox Flash than it's to sandbox any HTML5 website. Arguably much easier because there was no JIT back then. Flash also ran in an enclosed box on a website and had no access to DOM, which greatly lowers attack surface.
Or maybe I'm just not paying attention...
Had newgrounds continued into the 2010's, it would've been bought by Google to boost Google Wave / Circles / Plus whatever, and then it would've been actually shutdown.
So its age is actually what helped it survive I suspect.
Lots of fond memories of this website. I have many flash games and animations still on there. My favorite period of the internet.
You can still play them now, they ported it away from flash - which still offered experiences that we are just now beginning to match natively in terms of web gaming and video generation.