I have no idea how many of you out there have any idea what Newgrounds is. It's a place where people put up videos and games long before steam or youtube.
A lot of people remember it as that place where cock jokes, homophobia and porn reigned supreme.
It is also a place where if you had flash you could make a video, put it up, and have it looked at by a very active community that would rate it and give detailed feedback on it. It is a place of imagination and demos.
When the internet was young and so was I the gaming systems I had was a mac. The mac couldn't run most games. I was always looking for new or interesting or free games on the early internet. I found Newgrounds. A place where games were coming out that I could play all the time. Most of them were short. Under ten minutes. Shorter than that even. They were wacky, weird, and often just a single idea, screen, puzzle, or mood.
They were experimental and beautiful. Horrific and challenging. Ugly and charming. They took what a computer game could be and stretched it. They played with the concept of genera and art and good taste and they tossed it around like a rag doll. A lot of what I know about game design and a lot of my favorite games came out of this site. I still go looking every now and then and still find things that blow me away.
I think there is value in the short. I think some of the best fiction ever written is in short stories. I think some of the best films of all time are in short films. I think some of the best jokes ever told are one liners. I think there is value to short fiction. A beauty in simplicity. I think that something being short and free doesn't preclude it from being powerful or emotionally connecting with someone.
Newgrounds showed me what games could be. It showed a lot of people on the internet what games could be. That they didn't have to be defined in the ways they had been up to that point. More importantly, it gave people a place to showcase them. To vote and share and express themselves through games at one another.
Dead Horizon wouldn't exist without Newgrounds. In many ways I might not exist without it. If you have a few moments, please go vote on the Newgrounds version of Dead Horizon and then... look at some other things on the site. You might find something surprising.
Good? Bad? Hard to say. Just surprising.
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/698298