Tom Fulp and Newgrounds: The Founder Who Never Sold Out or Left

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In 1991, a 13-year-old Tom Fulp cut and pasted together a fanzine about the Neo Geo console called New Ground and mailed it to about 100 members of a Prodigy club. By 1995 he had moved the idea online, and as a Drexel University student he began making crude games such as Club a Seal and Assassin. In 1999 he released Pico's School, a Flash game far more polished than the web of that era was used to, and gathered his scattered projects under a single domain with a page he called the Portal.

This episode treats Fulp's career as a history of the internet in miniature. When strangers began emailing him their own creations, he and a friend named Ross automated the Portal in 2000, creating an open stage for user-made animation and games years before YouTube. What followed was three decades of caretaking: community voting systems, media storms over violent games, a painful choice between free expression and compassion, and a rescue effort when Flash itself was shut off.

• Under the Judgment system, users rated submissions from zero to five stars, and anything below the threshold was blammed, deleted with only its reviews kept in a section called the obituary.
• Art and audio relied on scouting: an established user vouched for a newcomer and could lose that privilege if the newcomer broke the rules.
• After a 2007 torture game drew fire from NBC and Fox News, Fulp noted that the networks were airing footage of the game they condemned.
• In 2013, grieving parents contacted him about a Sandy Hook simulation, and he removed it, writing publicly that compassion had to outweigh his anti-censorship policy.
• As browsers dropped Flash by 2020, he sponsored Ruffle, an emulator written in Rust, and in 2021 he received a Pioneer Award from the Game Developers Choice Awards.