207 - Newgrounds and Flash Games
Added 2025-09-17 06:00:08 +0000 UTCThe lads boot up Newgrounds and take The Impossible Quiz as they dive into the bizarre and labyrinthine world of the bread and butter of the Web 2.0: Flash Games. Topics include the origins of Newgrounds, the boundless creativity (and trolling) of the flash scene, and what it means to be the lead gay technician of one of the most influential flash games of all time.
Media Referenced in this Episode:
TWOAPW theme by Brendan Dalton: Patreon // brendan-dalton.com // brendandalton.bandcamp.comInterstitial: “Pages 13-21 of ‘The Hidden Enemy’” // Written and Performed by Josh Boerman // Music by Wendy Carlos
Comments
brb making a second patreon account to subscribe again in memory of the triangle shortywaist factory fire
Robert Heilman
2025-10-21 19:14:09 +0000 UTCYeah, I remember being early in transition in 2018, and deciding to look up some flash games and I found out that the creator of :the game: series also transitioned, and it was a moment I still think about quite a bit.
Just the Worst
2025-10-14 21:31:53 +0000 UTCWith the covering of flash games, my dream of a Bionicle episode has crept ever so slightly closer to
OfficialPunGuy
2025-10-03 10:31:55 +0000 UTCThis site doesn't get talked about nearly enough but the folks that were making games for armor games were probably some of the most talented people in the space. i have huge affection for John Cooney's (jmtb02) work; he made the achievement unlocked games, elephant quest, elephant rave, and epic combo among others. Chris "Con" Condon (operating under the name "Con Artist" made the game that angry birds presumably ripped off "Crash the Castle" and "Crash the Castle 2" and made The zombie defense shooter "The Last Stand" which had 3 sequels one of which is a multi hour 2d side scrolling RPG shooter made entirely in flash that had a had hand in inspiring COD: WAW's Nazi zombies mode! "A few hours after talking to Dan about doing the extra content, I was taking to one of our designers, Sean Slayback, about tower defense games and the proposal to make one. He mentioned a game called “The Last Stand“, which is a flash game where you play as a survivor fighting off zombies. Zombies run towards you and start tearing at a large barricade that is protecting your area. If they break through, you’re pretty much toast, so you move around in your little section of the screen shooting various guns to try to keep them from breaking in. The rules are pretty standard for a tower defense game but with some cool twists. After every round, you get some points which you can spend on building back your barricade, looking for survivors, and looking for new weapons. So depending on how you play, you might choose to get a new weapon, or more people to help you defend, or simply build up your defenses. So, I played a few rounds and had a huge epiphany. “Zombie Nazis!” I thought to myself. You could do a lot of the same stuff here, but make it more interactive and more intense in the first person. What you you could actually buy barricades in real time? What if you actually could find and buy weapons in the level? What if you could unlock new areas that changed the strategy of the game and the flow of the enemies? Plus you could play in co-op! We have zombie-like animations already (the dazed guys), this is a no-brainier prototype! The engine supported all these ideas and I could immediately see how they could be implemented. I immediately rushed over to Dan’s office. “Hey, so I have this idea, I think it’s going to be awesome. Let’s do a tower defense game where zombies are attacking a building you’re holed up in!” You could tell that he wasn’t sold on the idea. I gave him my pitch anyway but he wasn’t terribly impressed, even after showing him “The Last Stand”. He told me we wouldn’t have enough time to make it, doing such a game mode would require all new assets, it’d be a huge risk, the mode didn’t fit the theme of the game at all plus it would be too campy. However, when I started pitching the idea to others on the team, they seemed to love it, especially some guys that had played a lot of WarCraft or StarCraft and knew a lot about tower defense games (those blizzard game were where the Tower Defense craze got really popular)." -Jessie Snyder; Treyarch Developer and Creator of Nazi Zombies. from his Blog post "Nazi Zombies, Ray Guns and Magic Chests" November 11, 2008 https://www.jessesnyder.org/trenches/?p=42
Elliecat
2025-09-29 07:31:18 +0000 UTCAll this big goku talk reminded me of what happens when a normal man tries to eat a gokugian sized meal. https://youtu.be/Z0E2lmgLF_k?si=rHIfhSoYM153UpxB
Christopher Barnes
2025-09-23 14:05:48 +0000 UTCI guess the Emogame series was never on Newgrounds? I never played (or really even saw) any other Flash games outside the computer lab, and everything in there tended to be knockoff Marios--like, literally somebody remaking Mario 1 in Flash
Jonathan V. Cann
2025-09-19 00:16:52 +0000 UTCNames that are also verbs you say, like Alford? Are we not counting turret defense custom maps from StarCraft and Warcraft as tower defense games?
Tom Hauptman
2025-09-18 22:29:58 +0000 UTC
