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.

I also made (with Rob as the artist) the first commissioned game for what would eventually be the really popular Armor Games site. When he got started he was wanting to do LOTR themed games and was calling his site Games of Gondor, but he didn't stick with it long probably because of legal reasons. It was called Save The Ring!

Here's my user profile, same name as I am on here: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/

A community of games, music, and art

And a legendary one at that!

I remember spending so many hours playing little flash games on Newgrounds and other sites like it in lower secondary school during the breaks. Running up to the library room where the computers where, to get the most amount of computer time squeezed into the short and long breaks.

For a while, my class teacher had me banned from using the computers because she said I shouldn’t use every break to just run to the computers. Maybe she was right that it wasn’t completely healthy. But it’s not like I was alone in running to them, my friends did too, and even though I may have been particularly excited to use the computers I still did things together with my friends both in front of those computers and other socialising with them after school etc.

Even the same old games are still there

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/301341

Looking up my user, kind of embarrassing to see comments from 22 years ago asking and giving code advice.

However, it does raise lots of nostalgia for the BBS era.

[0] - https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/599831

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/201982

The community tutorials were good, even if you were drawing technicolor ponies with drug addictions

You can still play them now, they ported it away from flash - which still offered experiences that we are just now beginning to match natively in terms of web gaming and video generation.

Lots of fond memories of this website. I have many flash games and animations still on there. My favorite period of the internet.

Or maybe I'm just not paying attention...