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.

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.

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.

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.

Hell yeah Pico's School is still up https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/310349