Newgrounds 2nd Annual Tank Awards

So, apparently my site’s been down for quite some time and I just now noticed because I don’t have internets at my house for the time being.

Also as a side note, I have a plugin for WordPress that’s half working, if anyone wants to get emailed every time there’s a new post on my site, just send an email to the address on the Contact Me page. If you want to keep it simple, just put ‘add me’ as the subject.

Anyways, figured I’d expand this post a bit, since Newgrounds is a huge part of my Flash games career, maybe even the only reason I ever got into Flash in the first place. So here’s a nice little story for anyone who really cares 😀

Click below to read it!

Now, I’ve always had a problem with the Web 2.0 moniker. Not that I have anything against user generated content or rich media content, since my games are technically both. But see, that’s the thing, long before the intertubes was proclaimed to be at version two point oh, some friends and I would gather around the computer, waiting for very silly or very very crude user created Flash movies to download over a 56k modem. A few of those really stood out to me. First was the Kermit Kombat series by Rocky Pinnicle of Neptune Circle . It was the first time that I saw a homegrown cartoon series with characters and a running plot that I actually cared about. You could tell that it was something that was just made by one guy just having fun, and really made me thing, man, I’d love to be able to publish something online that people actually care about.

Now I had been watching Flash videos for awhile, Newgrounds, shockwave.com had episodes of Dilbert and other cartoon shorts back then, can you believe there was actually a time when video on the internet was a rarity that I actually sought out because it was so cool? This was the days of the awful Real Player, and compared to full streaming video, Flash cartoons usually didn’t have much buffer time. I think the first time I had seen an actual game made by a single person in Flash that used any sort of physics was Gravity Ball II created by one of the early members of Tomorrow’s Nobodies. And of course, the legendary Alien Hominid by Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin proved once and for all that you can create a console quality game entirely in Flash.

I didn’t go directly into Flash programming, though. I had played around with BASIC on a Ti-86 in high school, but that was the extent of it. See, there was a time when I played around with video editing a lot, making music videos and stuff like that, and I started playing around with stop motion animation around the time that Robert ‘Knox’ Benfer was uploading his ‘klay’ shorts to Newgrounds. Realizing that Flash could do video (yes, Flash could stream video for years and years now, and it was just as bad then as it is now), I used that as an excuse to download a Flash trial and poke around with it.

So yeah, my first ever submissions to the interwebs were stop motion animations. They’re still on Newgrounds, but I’m not sure how many people have actually looked.

Eventually I started playing around with Actionscript, the first movie I submitted didn’t even have a preloader!

So yeah, as far as I’m concerned, Flash and what shareholders like to call ‘Web 2.0’ started years and years ago with Newgrounds. I really wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for Newgrounds, and I’m sure that there are tons of artists out there who could say the same thing.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/486001