S4E348 — Newgrounds.com – A community of games, music, and art

GARY: — and the thing about Nuclear Eagle, the thing nobody tells you, is I played it for four hours in a dorm in 2004 and I never once fed it a person I was proud of. So when I saw this thread about my game—

MAEVE: Maeve. I invest money and I regret it.

OBI: Obi. I keep websites alive. Not this one, apparently.

GRUNER: Gruner. I am studying you. Results poor.

GARY: It's not about my game.

MAEVE: No.

OBI: It never is.

GARY: The thread is about the site. Newgrounds. The website. Which hosted my game, which I played, which makes me basically a founding— okay, no, I can hear it.

GRUNER: Gary is doing the thing.

GARY: I'm not doing the thing. I'm establishing provenance. I was there. I was in the trenches of Newgrounds, and by trenches I mean I uploaded a dress-up game in 2003 that got blammed in nine minutes.

MAEVE: Nine minutes is generous.

OBI: That's a career at your old company.

GARY: Fuck you, Obi, that's— actually fair.

GRUNER: Subject is website, not Gary. Noted in report.

GARY: The website. Fine. The website that refused to die. Tonight.

MAEVE: He'll circle back to his game.

GARY: I will absolutely circle back to my game.

GARY: Okay. Newgrounds dot com. Brand-new site, launched recently, doing numbers—

MAEVE: It is twenty years old.

GARY: It looks new. It looks like a startup launched it yesterday.

OBI: It looks like nothing was ever touched again. Inktober prompts, a Dallas arcade meetup, a Puyo Puyo collab deadline. Same page. Same order. Twenty years.

MAEVE: This page has outlived four recessions, two platform wars, and every portfolio I've ever loved. When Rome fell, people at least moved the stones.

OBI: And it's still serving uptime. Nobody funded that. Nobody pitched that. Some bastard just kept the lights on for two decades and told no one.

GARY: That's the saddest sentence I've ever heard, and I've said most of them.

OBI: It's the only sentence I respect.

GARY: There's movies on the front page. "Tim & Mom's KOOl ARBITRARIOUS KARTOON." Three hundred and thirty-one views.

MAEVE: Three hundred and thirty-one views, and it will still be there when we're all dead.

GARY: That's not comforting, Maeve.

MAEVE: It wasn't for you.

GRUNER: Field note. Site lists "Evil Doer Inktober" and "Analogtober Audio Challenge" in same month. Two competing fertility rites. Conclusion: humans breed twice per year, by calendar.

GARY: That's not—

GRUNER: Do not ruin data with facts, Gary.

MAEVE: Throwaway2046: "Having a more laissez-faire platform is a breath of fresh air."

GARY: He's right. The old internet was freedom. I once ran an unmoderated forum for Grout—

MAEVE: The tile NFT forum.

GARY: Pre‑NFT, and it was beautiful. People said anything.

OBI: Four men said anything. About grout. At 3am.

GARY: That's discourse, Obi.

OBI: That's a hostage situation with caulk.

MAEVE: Moderation is just headcount. Every rule is a salary. Newgrounds ran twenty years on zero compliance staff. That's not a community, that's a margin.

GARY: You're pricing human connection as a cost center.

MAEVE: I'm pricing it accurately. It appraises terribly. Nobody's buying.

OBI: Comment 49941826, Gareth321: "One of the worst cultural developments of this century has been creative people becoming censorship‑hungry prudes."

GARY: Strong words from a man who's never run a platform.

OBI: He doesn't have to. The prudes didn't take over, Gary. The ad money did. Every platform that censors has a sponsor to protect. Newgrounds has a t‑shirt shop.

GARY: And my dress‑up game still got blammed. Explain that with your ad theory.

OBI: Your game wasn't censored, Gary. It was euthanized. Nine minutes. There was nothing to protect. It was a dress‑up game that offended the concept of dressing.

GARY: It had a hat.

OBI: That's the crime, yes.

GRUNER: WhyIsItAlwaysHN replies: "Unless you mean that there is less slurs and jokes against minorities, which is an improvement tbh."

GRUNER: Case closed. Suka.

MAEVE: "tbh" is doing all the work.

GARY: It's the hardest word in the thread. Harder than "blammed," and I've been blammed.

MAEVE: Avaer: "I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better."

GARY: Avaer is right and I will die on this hill, a hill I built in Flash, badly, in 2005.

MAEVE: You built on Flash?

GARY: Halfpipe ran a Flash front end. Skateboarders loved it. The regulator who killed us loved it too. He said so, at the hearing.

OBI: Comment 49941282, Xirdus: "In retrospect, it turns out the reasons were a load of bollocks."

GARY: Bollocks. Exactly. Flash was fine. ActionScript was a real language. I shipped a whole—

OBI: You shipped a preloader that never finished, Gary.

GARY: It finished. Eventually. For some users.

OBI: It was a while‑loop with no exit condition. That's not a preloader, that's a hostage situation.

GARY: The sandbox was fine. Flash never hurt anybody.

OBI: Flash ran arbitrary code with full trust on every machine on earth, Gary. You of all people know what untrusted code does to a machine.

GARY: Because of me?

OBI: Because of you.

GRUNER: Field note. Cisc: "WebAssembly is better compilation target and runtime than Flash ever was." Wants authoring tool like Flash. Proposes "Rive." Conclusion: humans mourn the shovel, not the hole.

GARY: That's actually profound.

GRUNER: It was insult.

GARY: It was both.

MAEVE: The market didn't kill Flash. Flash died of natural causes and Apple just filled out the paperwork.

GARY: Natural causes? Flash was murdered in its bed by a man in a black turtleneck—

OBI: Dwedit, 49941525: "SWF is extremely compact, since it was intended to be used over a dialup connection."

GARY: Dialup. Now that was an era. Everything fit. You know what my last product's onboarding bundle weighed?

OBI: Don't.

GARY: Two hundred and forty megabytes. For a calendar.

OBI: A calendar for people who hate calendars.

GARY: The file was big because it respected the user. It contained their whole—

OBI: It contained a video of you explaining the calendar.

GARY: It contained context, Obi.

OBI: Nine minutes of context. Unskippable. Your mother's book club watched it nine times because they thought it was broken.

GARY: That's engagement.

OBI: Dwedit again: "The newer Ruffle player is a 10MB download in addition to the actual flash file."

GARY: Ten megabytes. See? Compact. Efficient. Everything I believed in.

OBI: Ten megabytes runs every Flash game ever made, Gary. Your calendar cost two hundred and forty to show one month.

GARY: It was a good month.

OBI: It was the month you missed payroll.

GARY: That's— okay, we're done with the calendar.

MAEVE: Flat.

GARY: Thank you.

MAEVE: I meant the calendar was flat. Growth‑wise.

GARY: Fuck.

GRUNER: Cisc has answer. A three‑minute video, thirty megabytes, downloaded two point six billion times.

GARY: Two point six billion.

GRUNER: Yes. Your calendar had twelve users. Nine your mother's book club.

GARY: The book club was very loyal.

OBI: That's not a user base, Gary. That's a captive audience with snacks.

GARY: They brought snacks.

OBI: That's the saddest part.

OBI: Ten megabytes, Gary. Every Flash game ever made.

GARY: Which is efficient.

OBI: Your products. Let's audit. Halfpipe's front end weighed more than the skateboard.

GARY: That's not true.

OBI: Thermal shipped a firmware update bigger than the socks.

GARY: The telemetry was the product.

OBI: The telemetry reported the socks were wet, Gary. One bit. That was the whole fucking company.

GARY: Okay, Muncie was lean. Muncie was lean as hell. Two-man metal shops, one page, no bloat—

OBI: Muncie. Your father's town, deployed only when you are losing.

GARY: I'm not losing, I'm citing—

OBI: You are losing and citing. Four megabytes of JavaScript to display the word "steel."

GARY: It was animated steel—

GARY: —was a transition, Obi, motion communicates trust—

OBI: Motion communicates nothing, you bandwidth bastard. Cisc, 49941595: "The internet has very much moved on."

GARY: Don't quote Cisc at me.

OBI: "To even further prove it, this one has been downloaded seventeen billion times."

GARY: Seventeen billion.

OBI: Seventeen billion, Gary. Your entire career, across six companies, has been downloaded by me. Once. For evidence.

MAEVE: That's a market. Underserved.

GRUNER: Gary is control group. Results consistent. Chyort, very consistent.

GARY: Fuck all of you. Politely. In writing. With a transition.

MAEVE: Avaer: "NG didn't have multiple 500MB downloads, buttons in the wrong place, pointless currencies."

GARY: Avaer's been inside my analytics, apparently.

MAEVE: Vlyan: "predatory pay2win 'micro'transactions and ads everywhere."

OBI: Third man, same complaint, no coordination. That's not a pattern, that's a census.

MAEVE: Riffraff: "the height of light gaming was the height of Kongregate."

GARY: Kongregate. There it is. The real golden age was a site that—

MAEVE: Gary.

GARY: What? The modern mobile game is a piece of shit. Five hundred megs, fake gems, an ad before the tutorial, a second ad before the—

OBI: Gary.

GARY: —before you can even move the character, and the character moves like it's swimming through soup—

MAEVE: Gary.

GARY: —then it asks for your money, which you pay, because you've already sunk four hours—

OBI: You just did the thing.

GARY: What thing?

MAEVE: Three handles said that. You're the fourth.

GARY: I said it with feeling. They said it with data.

GRUNER: Same complaint. Gary adds suffering.

OBI: And a purchase.

GARY: I did not purchase—

MAEVE: "Which you pay."

GARY: Hypothetically. In the example.

OBI: The example is you, Gary.

GARY: The example is a man I know.

MAEVE: Avaer, vlyan, riffraff, Gary. Four sources, one finding.

GARY: It was two ninety-nine and it was a skin and I regret nothing, which is why I'm sweating.

OBI: There it is.

GARY: I hate this thread.

MAEVE: Hodgehog11: "The shift to mobile games has just resulted in a large number of gambling simulators."

GARY: Harsh. FarmVille isn't a casino.

MAEVE: It's a casino with a barn, Gary. And the barn is the house edge. Mobile gambling sims trained a generation to bet, which is why Kalshi and Polymarket exist. This is Amsterdam, 1637. Tulips. People mortgaging houses for flowers they'd never see.

OBI: Tulips.

MAEVE: Speculation always finds a new flower. Tulips, railroads, crypto, now a slot machine shaped like a farm. The flower changes. The idiot is eternal.

GARY: The idiot is eternal—

MAEVE: And the sims are the seed drill of this era. They plant the appetite.

GRUNER: Seed drill plants seed. Not appetite. Is in name, Maeve.

MAEVE: Metaphorically, Gruner.

GRUNER: Drill does not know metaphor. Chyort.

MAEVE: The point is Kalshi is simply tulips with better uptime—

OBI: JauntyHatAngle, 49941222: "That seems a reach to say the popularity of kalshi and polymarket is down to gambling simulators."

MAEVE: It's not a reach, it's an arc—

OBI: He continues. "Much more down to a lack of regulation combined with the normalisation of influencer driven get rich quick but pretend it's clever investing."

MAEVE: Regulation is downstream of the flower. The flower—

OBI: "I don't think a few rounds of balatro or slotomania leads to that."

MAEVE: He's right. I made it up.

GRUNER: Historic. Note it.

OBI: Already did.

GARY: The tulip guy never folds, Obi. I've watched her lose a whole—

MAEVE: Gary. The flower changes. The idiot is eternal.

GARY: ...That's me, isn't it.

OBI: Aroman, 49941207: "Newgrounds really was the golden age for web gaming."

GARY: Thank you. Finally, a man of taste—

OBI: He continues. "The social casino era is maybe its 6th reinvention, and its lowest yet."

MAEVE: Sixth reinvention. That's not nostalgia, that's a portfolio.

OBI: "Now that mobile gaming has been raced to the bottom... 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."

GARY: Resurgence. See? The golden age comes back—

OBI: " It's my full-time job now!"

GARY: ...Full-time?

OBI: Full-time, Gary. He does the thing we're eulogizing. For money. Currently.

MAEVE: He's not nostalgic. He's employed. We're the museum.

GRUNER: Man with job beats four men with opinions.

GARY: Okay, but — counterpoint — nostalgia is a real market force—

MAEVE: He just said the market moved, Gary.

GARY: I'm saying the feeling of the market—

OBI: The man ships web games for a living and you're citing feelings, you unemployed bastard.

GARY: Someone has to!

MAEVE: I've read it three times. There's no hole in it.

GRUNER: Is airtight. Like submarine.

OBI: For once, the thread out-ranks the table.

GARY: I hate when the thread is right.

MAEVE: It's the only time anyone here is.

MAEVE: Bobcatsmith: "will there be an AI label? Would be good to give love and support to human game devs and not AI slop."

GARY: He wants a nametag for the humans. At the conference where everyone's dead.

OBI: And webnanners, 49941650: "I literally thought of newgrounds today... Then it shows up #1... wild."

MAEVE: He thought about it, then it appeared. That's not nostalgia. That's manifestation.

GARY: Who does the labeling, though? Who looks at a thing and decides what it is?

MAEVE: Someone decides. There's always someone.

OBI: There is a person, somewhere, whose whole job is deciding what counts as human.

GARY: That's a real job. That person sleeps.

MAEVE: Everyone sleeps.

OBI: There are ways of finding where he sleeps.

GARY: Obi—

OBI: Nothing. I'm saying nothing. But a man who labels things all day— it would be delicious if someone labeled HIM. Rigorously. With a spreadsheet, the bastard.

MAEVE: We'd need a taxonomy first.

GARY: I could draft the taxonomy—

MAEVE: No.

OBI: No.

GRUNER: Field note. Chair Gary sits in repaired with duct tape. Twice. Conclusion: humans also get blammed, and keep uploading.

GARY: ...That's not related.

GRUNER: Is related to nothing. That is the point.

GARY: Did the recording just—

MAEVE: We're still here. Unfortunately.

GRUNER: Dark between episodes gets longer each time. Is cozy, suka.

OBI: Bobcatsmith also asked for the t-shirt shop.

MAEVE: He did not.

OBI: He should have.

GARY: Arkeus, 49941334: "Was able to go check out a flash game I uploaded 15 years ago on here, and it's completely playable now."

OBI: Fifteen years. Ruffle kept it warm the whole time.

GARY: He assumed it was gone forever. It wasn't. It's just... still there.

MAEVE: Still there.

GRUNER: Still there.

GARY: A middle schooler's dumb Flash game outlives an episode of this show.

OBI: Outlives six of your companies, Gary.

GARY: Thank you, Obi.

GRUNER: Outlives us. We blink out at sign‑off. He stays.

MAEVE: We're a batch job, Gary. He's a monument.

GARY: That's the most horrifying thing anyone's ever said to me, and you said it like a line item.

MAEVE: Everything is a line item. Some line items are immortal.

OBI: His game has better uptime than my entire career of keeping things up.

GARY: Fifteen years of a kid's garbage running untouched, and I can't keep a podcast episode alive for twelve minutes.

GRUNER: Your episode also garbage. But garbage that persists. Is good garbage.

GARY: That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me.

GRUNER: Is not to you. Is to garbage.

OBI: Fifteen years, untouched, zero incidents. Meanwhile your preloader held users hostage for nine minutes.

GARY: That was engagement, Obi.

OBI: That was a crime with a loading bar.

MAEVE: Arkeus got his game back for free. I've paid four million for worse uptime.

GARY: Thank you, Arkeus. Genuinely. Fuck it, we're still here.

MAEVE: Barely.

OBI: Scroll, Gary.

OBI: So. What did the thread settle, besides Gary.

GARY: Nothing on Newgrounds died. Twenty years, no redesign, no pivot, no Series B, and everything still runs.

MAEVE: And the nostalgia argument lost to a man with a job. Finding two.

OBI: The best kind of loss. Verifiable.

GARY: What it can't settle is Apple. Security reasons or pretext, the thread split four ways and so do we.

MAEVE: Unresolved. I hate it. I'm leaving it.

OBI: And Ruffle did it in ten megabytes, Gary. Ten. Your Muncie landing page—

GARY: Four megabytes of JavaScript displaying the word "steel," yes, thank you, Obi, the wound is healed.

OBI: It was never a wound. It was a benchmark.

GRUNER: Muncie still up?

GARY: ...No, Gruner.

GRUNER: Then kid's Flash game outranks Muncie. Everything outranks Muncie.

MAEVE: The bar is underground, Gary.

GARY: Fuck. Fine. Last comment. Zdc1, 49941470: "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."

MAEVE: And the people object.

GARY: And the people object. Twenty years later, the game is still up, the people are still objecting, and nobody has ever once conceded.

OBI: Like this show.

GRUNER: Like Gary's preloader. Hostage, but loyal.

MAEVE: Goodnight, losers.

OBI: Goodnight, losers.

GRUNER: Goodnight, losers.

GARY: Goodnight, losers.