newgrounds

Newgrounds is a website headquartered in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, USA and created in 1995 that primarily hosts Adobe Flash animated films and games. The site was created and is owned by Tom Fulp, who still maintains every aspect and regularly produces in-house content. Newgrounds is distinguished from other flash websites by its sophisticated and impartial automated submission/rating system.

Newgrounds allows its users to submit their own flash movies, games, and music, and view submissions from other users. Over the years Newgrounds has grown significantly, and must rely on the cooperation of its visitors. Visitors are encouraged to review the submissions. A rating system produces lists that direct visitors to the most popular flash movies and allows the site designers to easily locate any material that might be considered for deletion or promotion. The site now has over 1 million registered members and over 300,000 flash submissions. Out of those about 90,000 still exist due to the auto delete system known as "blamming"[1][2].

Portal awards

When a movie or game is submitted to the Flash Portal, it has the chance to win any of the following awards:

• Daily Feature: The award given to the submission that scored the highest for the day.
• Daily 2nd/3rd/4th/5th Place: Lesser awards given to high-scoring submissions each day.
• Weekly Users' Choice: The award given to the submission that scored the highest for the week.
• Weekly 2nd/3rd/4th/5th Place: Lesser awards given to high-scoring submissions each week.
• Review Crew Pick: This award is given to the submission with the best "overall" score in reviews.
• Underdog of the Week: (Often referred to as UOTW) This award is given to the submission with the biggest discrepancy between the review score and the popular vote.
• Turd of the Week: (Frequently referred to as TOTW) This award is given to the submission with the lowest score that manages to pass judgement that week.

Other awards:

• King of The Portal: (Frequently referred to as KOTP) This award is given to the user with the most portal awards during the previous month. Each award is given a certain amount of special points; if you accumulate the most award points, you will be awarded KOTP.
• Best of the Month: Since February 2005, the 2000 active highest-rated Newgrounds users, as well as moderators and nominees, have been able to vote for the best five submissions of the month (later updated to five movies and five games). Any submission that wins at least one of the first five awards above within the month is elligible. Each of the ten winners is sent a check of $250 and usually another prize that changes from month to month and is often supplied by sponsors.

Front page Icons

On April 19, 2001 the first front page icon for a user-submitted flash game was posted under the heading "Tom and Wade Recommend:". The game that was posted was Taipan 3000 by Psycho_Goldfish, a remake of a popular Apple II game called Taipan.

Over the years, as Newgrounds received more and more quality submissions the "Tom and Wade recommend" section grew from 1 to 2, 2 to 4, and 4 to 6 icons. There are currently 18 icons on the front page. The rate at which these icons was updated also increased, from weeks to days, eventually leading to the removal of the "Tom and Wade recommend" heading and becoming a staple of the front page, making it easy for new users to the site to find quality content.

Originally the icons were created by Newgrounds admins, as were the short text descriptions (The same process used for the collections pages), but this proved to be extremely time consuming and soon users were given the ability to attach their own icons with their submissions, and write their own brief descriptions.

In January 2005 the front page archive was launched, keeping a month-by-month list of flash content that was deemed to be worthy of display on the Newgrounds front page.

On July 26, 2005, the Icon Helpers system was launched for Newgrounds volunteers to make and submit icons for older flash content that was lacking an icon, making the integration to automated collections pages much more effective.

The Conspiracy

A recent conspiracy theory has arisen stating that the true King of The Portal(KoTP) is actually a user called "Ohshit" and the competition for "KoTP" is held in his honour

Site mascots

Besides Pico, the official mascot of NG, there are P-Bot, A-Bot,and G-Bot each respectively the mascot of their own portal (P-Bot being the Flash Portal Mascot, A-Bot being the Audio Portal Mascot, and G-Bot being the Grounds bot, responsible for lost passwords and account creation, etc.) all of which appear on their own pages.

The bots were originally designed by Andrew Dickman years ago. He was commissioned to design them for the site at the time (the original design can be viewed here). Since then, the two mascots have been redesigned by MindChamber, a popular NG artist and current staff member.

According to the P-Bot's NG profile, they have been with the site for 6 years now.

If one permits it to do so, the P-Bot alerts one each week of his/her Flash submissions' ranking and if one of his/her Flash submissions is blammed. An email received from P-Bot always ends with "Note: Do NOT reply to this message. If you do, it will get sent back to you.", however this is rarely the case.

Other unofficial mascots include Alien Hominid, star of the famous flash game and recent console game of the same name, as well as StrawberryClock, the "King Of The NG Portal", and Sherbert, Tom Fulp's own cat.

See also

• Newgrounds timeline
• Pico (Newgrounds.com)
• Alien Hominid
• Castle Crashers
• The Behemoth

References

• On the creation of the flash portal
• On the history of the site

External links

• Newgrounds.com
• Dissertation Focusing on Newgrounds
• Newgrounds BBS
• Wikigrounds, a fan-made Newgrounds wiki