Newgrounds has been running since 1995, which makes it older than almost everything else on the internet that still works. Tom Fulp started it as a teenager and has run it ever since, and for a generation of animators and game developers it was the first place anybody saw their work.
Its importance is difficult to overstate for the people who came through it. Studios were founded by users who met on its forums, careers in animation and game development began with submissions to its portal, and a great deal of what later became mainstream internet humour was worked out there first.
When Flash was discontinued in 2020, an enormous body of animation across the whole web simply stopped playing. Newgrounds responded by building its own player to keep two decades of submissions working, which is an unusual thing for a site to do and says a good deal about how it regards its own archive.
Why this archive is worth keeping
It is the largest surviving collection of independent web animation, and much of it exists nowhere else. Creators who stopped posting fifteen years ago left work there that was never mirrored to any video platform and never will be.
The Flash episode showed how fragile that is. An entire era of the internet became unplayable in a single afternoon, and it was preserved only because one site chose to spend the effort. That is not a guarantee anyone should rely on twice.
And a great deal of it is genuinely good. Animation made by teenagers in the early 2000s launched people who now work on major productions, and the early work is frequently more interesting than what replaced it.
Saving a Newgrounds animation
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1
Copy the Newgrounds address
Take the newgrounds.com address from your browser. Video and animation submissions each have their own page with a numeric identifier.
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2
Supply the link in the field above
Paste it into the box at the top of this page, which starts reading it immediately.
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3
Take what is stored on Newgrounds
Video submissions are listed with their file sizes. Older material is frequently low resolution because that is what the era produced.
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4
Preserve your copy
Tap the row when it turns blue. Downloads on Android, the Files app on an iPhone.
Flash, video, and what can actually be saved
Newgrounds hosts two quite different things, and only one of them is a video file in any ordinary sense.
Why some submissions are not downloadable video
A great deal of the older portal consists of Flash movies and games, which are programs rather than video. They run in the site's own player and there is no MP4 underneath to fetch, because none was ever created.
Video submissions, which the site has accepted for many years now, are ordinary video files and behave like anything else. If a submission plays as a flat video rather than something interactive, it is almost certainly one of these.
For the Flash material the right approach is the site's own preservation work, which keeps it playable, or the Internet Archive's Flash emulation project. Neither produces a video file, but both keep the work alive, which is the thing that actually matters.
Newgrounds download questions
Can I download a Flash animation as video?
No. Flash submissions are programs rather than video files, so there is no MP4 to fetch. The site's own player keeps them running instead.
What about games?
Same answer. A game is software and cannot be saved as a video.
Which submissions can I save?
Video submissions, which the site has accepted for years. If it plays as a flat video rather than something you interact with, it is one of those.
Why is older animation such low resolution?
Because it was made for the screens and connections of the early 2000s. That is the original quality rather than a reduction.
How did Newgrounds survive Flash being discontinued?
By building its own player to keep two decades of submissions working, which very few sites bothered to do.
Can I save adult-rated submissions?
If the page is viewable without signing in, it behaves like any other. Anything requiring an account does not.
Where does the Newgrounds file save?
Downloads on Android, the Files app on an iPhone.
Will the artist be notified?
No. Nothing is reported and no account is involved on this side.
Is there a Newgrounds limit?
No cap and no queue.
Is it acceptable to archive from Newgrounds?
Keeping work that would otherwise vanish is a decent instinct and the community has always understood that. These are individual artists rather than companies, though, and many are still around — reposting their animation without credit is the one thing that genuinely upsets people there.