The time has come for our 2024 recap! There are a lot of links so please take some time to explore.

This was very much a “housekeeping” year but we managed to introduce some fun features along the way. While NG itself is turning 30, the backend codebase is coming up on 25 years. Much of that has changed and evolved over the years but there is an accumulation of old code, bandaids, bugs and general clutter that has been overdue for tidying and modernization.

That didn’t stop the rest of you from totally bringing it, though! The monthly “Best of” posts in particular are overflowing with goodies; I don’t think there is anywhere else on the Internet that can compare to what you’ll find below.

January

We kicked off the new year by overhauling the account sign-in process, introducing email 2FA as a default alternative for accounts that hadn't set up app-based 2FA. We then upgraded our password hashing, increasing the password limit to 512 characters in the process.

January 5th was the Anime Los Angeles Meetup.

Pixel Day was January 23rd, catch up on the Pixel Day winners!

Other highlights included the Sketch Collab, the live Slam Poetry Night, Art Gallery Collab, Office Depths Collab and the Break It Up Collab.

🏆 Best of January!

February

We updated PHP to the latest stable build, a lengthy project carried over from 2023, due to all the deprecated code.

Other highlights included the Valentine's Day Art Collab, Mall Music Collab, Summertime in Wintertime Collab, Corn Collab, The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Collab, Mean Girls Collab and the F Collab.

🏆 Best of February!

March

Dragon Ball Z creator Akira Toriyama passed on March 1st, resulting in a lot of Toriyama tribute art.

Our March updates included a flagging option for works that are majority generated by AI. 

A bunch of us met up at PAX Boston, which might become a recurring meetup spot in the years ahead.

The Music Triathlon hosted by @AED4 wrapped up!

@The-Great-One and @SplatterDash kicked off another Treasure Hunt. Revisit the Treasure Hunt winners!

Other highlights included the OP Battles Collab, RIP General Collab, Pokemon Mystery Meat Collab, Storytime Collab, 200+ BPM Collab, Adult Swim Collab and the Sandwich Collab.

🏆 Best of March!

April

In April we rolled out Forum Thread Ratings, one of the last places where ratings felt needed, in particular with art threads.

Season 2 of Smiling Friends introduced Gwimbly and we saw a lot of Gwimbly fan art.

Other highlights included the Playstation Collab, The Space Collab and the Earth Day Collab, 

🏆 Best of April!

May

Flash Forward wrapped up in May, check out the winning Flash games and interactive movies!

May 18th was Pico Day, check out the Pico Day winners!

@BrandyBuizel and @coby hosted a Pico Day Party in New Jersey and @Snackers hosted a Dublin, Ireland Meetup.

Other highlights included the Pico Day NJ Trading Cards, Sega Saturn Collab, Rock the Dragon Animation Jam, Matrix Collab, Ghost Collab, Nintendo 64 Collab Gallery, Kart Collab, World Goth Day Collab, Halloween in May Collab, A Sine of Relief Collab, Dragon Raid Collab and Pico Day Sticky Notes.

🏆 Best of May!

June

@CorTat-G and @DrewPBalls organized the Too Many Games Meetup!

@Graeme hosted a Gorgon Shield Art Contest, check out the Gorgon Shield Winners!

@Jamriot hosted another Writer’s Jam with 100 participants, check out the winners!

Other highlights included the NGTV Summer Bash, Sonic Shorts: Volume 9, Shorts: Volume 1000, The CD-i Collab, KinitoPET Collab, Homestuck FreshJamz Collab, Newgrounds Arcade Zone Collab, Sonic 33rd Anniversary Art Collab, NG Pride Month Collab, Bluey Sleepytime Reanimated, A Tale of Eternity and Newgrounds Trivia!

🏆 Best of June!

More below!

July

In July we introduced a new calendar, making events easier to browse. 

July 26th was the Wildwood, NJ Meetup!

Code cleanup continued, with some large under-the-hood changes rolling out this month.

Other highlights included the Transformers Collab, NG Bug Collab, Wallpaper 2.0 Collab, Darkstalkers 30th Collab, The Awesome Bird Collab, Pickle Collab and The Great American Collab.

🏆 Best of July!

August

August brought the unveiling of our new monthly voting system, making the voting process mobile-friendly and introducing categories for art and music, along with monthly trophy badges!

Some of us met up at Short Short Fest in Prospect Park, PA.

Clock Day was August 15th, like clockwork.

August 17th was the Melbourne Meetup!

@MindChamber hosted Robot Day on August 26th, check out the Robot Day winners!

@Random-storykeeper announced the Art Inspired Music Contest winners!

Winners of the NG Underdogs’ Audio Contest were announced by @TaintedLogic.

All month long in August was Summergrounds Showdown, an event organized by @Razur-Draws with daily NG-themed art prompts. You can browse the entries via the summergrounds2024 tag.

Other highlights included The Subspace Emissary Collab, Off the Grid Collab, Pukestravaganza Collab, FlipAClip Collab, Ninja Collab, Robot Day Collab Album, The One Piece Soyboy Collab and the Break-away FNAF Collab.

🏆 Best of August!

September

September 9th was the unveiling of the much anticipated Dreamcast Collab, with 316 participants!

@Arzonaut and friends hosted a Brazil Day Art Contest, check out the Brazil Day Winners!

September 22nd was Madness Day, check out the Madness Day Winners.

Madness Day collabs included MADNESS:Project Nexus ANIMATED, Madness Amalgamation Collab 3, Madness Day 2024 Collab Album and Somewhere Under Nevada 2.

Other highlights included the Wii Art Collab, NGAP MEGACOLLAB, OC Meme Collab, Mexican Independence Day Collab, The South Park Collab 2, Mecha Mayhem Collab, Newgrounds Movie Theater Collab 2024, Newgrounds Original Characters Cards Collab, Pico fans collab 2024.

🏆 Best of September!

October

In October we introduced Takeover Tuesday, an attempt to bring more people aboard as Supporters by giving them one day each week where they can feature something on the front page. It’s been a lot of fun so far!

@PsychoGoldfish hosted a Bzzzt Art Contest, check out the Bzzzt Art Winners.

October was our Halloween Spooktacular, check out the Halloween winners.

Other highlights included the Angry Birds Reanimated Collab, Shrieks and Screams Collab 2, Pokemon Variance Collab, OC’S BY NIGHT COLLAB, Fire Emblem Collab, Peak Halloween Collab, NG Pub Song Collab, A Night on the Farm, Halloween collab and the bird collab.

🏆 Best of October!

November

In November we made playlist optimizations and introduced a Supporter perk to increase the playlist limit from 100 to 200 items. Our audio player was updated to start each next song in a playlist from the beginning, vs where you left off. Lists of audio will also now load more entries when the in-page player reaches the end of what is currently loaded (so you don’t have to scroll down to load more).

The NG Audio Deathmatch hosted by @AED4 wrapped up!

@Flamadour hosted the Battle of the Bands, check out the Battle of the Bands winners!

Other highlights included the Newgrounds DS Collab, The Behemoth 20th Anniversary Collab, Steamed Goom Reanimated, Costume Jam 2024, Alien Collab, Blind World Collab, NGAP Doom Collab, NG Radio Collab, Infinite Remix Collab 2.0 and the NG Corporate Music Collab.

🏆 Best of November!

More below!

December

The Christmas spirit was running strong with NG this year, thanks to the return of Tankmas ADVENTure, co-organized by @MrShmoods and @squidly.

@Kolumbo organized the NGTV Christmas Marathon, @DannyGoodShirt delivered a Dr. Good’s Christmas Special and the @ClockCrew gave us Clocks Take Christmas.

@KingCrowned hosted a Tankmas Animation Jam, check out the Tankmas Jam Winners!

Our Art Secret Santa resulted in over 560 art gifts!

The Student Film Showcase continued for a third year.

There were two meetups: Midwest Furfest in IL and Fun Stop Arcade in NJ.

Other highlights included The Sketch Collab, The Great Homer Collab and the Piconjomas Art Collab.

"One more thing"

In the final days of 2024, NG upgraded to HTTP/3 for better performance and security.

Summary

Much of 2024 has been dedicated to overhauling existing systems, fixing bugs and performing code cleanup along the way, to make NG easier to maintain into the future. Pretty much everything on the backend was touched on this year.

It is thanks to the enduring efforts of so many people here that NG remained an interesting place to visit every day, even while the behind-the-scenes work wasn’t very glamorous. There are lots of new features we’d like to add but it has also proven worthwhile to keep improving on what is already here.

You can follow the entire history of NG on the NG History page!

Ruffle / Flash Preservation Status

NG remained a Ruffle sponsor throughout 2024. Ruffle is the open source Flash emulator we use to keep Flash content running in the browser.

Dinnerbone wrote an update in September, outlining the progress Ruffle has made in 2024. It has continued to improve since then!

On our end, we switched thousands more games to Ruffle this year. Big thanks to @olskoo / orbitz for testing a lot of games and fixing many broken ones!

We’ll be hosting another Flash Forward event in 2025 and the deadline is already on the calendar as April 20th, if you want to make a new Flash game or interactive movie to participate. We’ll kick off prize fundraising in the new year.

Monthly Prizes

We managed to maintain our prize pool this year and even expanded it, thanks to generous recurring sponsors like @RobTop (Geometry Dash), @MassiveMonster (Cult of the Lamb), @PuffballsUnited (Among Us), @Jazza (Draw with Jazza), @TeamTrivial, @53xy83457 and @River.

End of 2024 Supporter Status

We are ending the year with ~8,200 active Supporters, on par with our 2022 total but 300 shy of where we left off in 2023. Expenses continue to rise and we’ve never succeeded in having enough Supporters to cover costs. If you think NG is worth keeping around, consider tossing in a few bucks each month!

Site Skins

Here are the site skins from this year!

Passings

This year we lost Squize and BlackDevilX.

2024 Recap Posts

If you write a recap blog post for 2024, tag it with 2024-recap.

AnassAnimationPro

Anamonator

BaconAwakenComix

BlakeTakesTheCake

Blaznthekid

bobatealee

BoiledMilkz

burastar

CaioAdriel2006

Carcitypilot31

ChazDude

Chris

ddnikki

DrSevenSeizeMD

Dry

Dungeonation

ElRandomGMD

Ferbun

Fish125

ForgottenDawn

Galneda

GoldShinx

Halpmynamesucks

JSuika

JuneSSantos

Just-a-ng-dummy

kaiakairos

KittyhawkMontrose

KokoroHatsaru

Kyserton

littlbox

Little-Rena

Loopykins

Luis

M-kirbs

Magnus727

MassiveMarioLuigi700

MasterHand4444

Mitchelf

MysticSkillz

OnlyHereForNostalgia

OnyxGalaria

PLJerry

PotAToastN

ProsciuttoMan

QueenBoo

Quest

sebulant

sereneFalconer

ShangXian

Simoes1000

Sjhillustration

Slimygoo

Snackers

Solito

TeamTrivial

TeffyD

UnculteredMutt

vekoN

vlsrb

zayJax

zeedox

This was a damn good recap. I thought 2023 was damn good, but 2024 blew it out of the water.

Happy new year, Tom - may 2025 keep the good times rolling.

I think there were like four New Jersey meetups in this year alone!

2023 and 2024 have been some great years for this site! May they stay that way as Newgrounds continues on!

Happy New Year to all!

Happy new year, NG team! 2024 was an awesome year! Can't wait to see some more exciting stuff for 2025!

I thought this year was one of the biggest years. Not only by the amount of community support, new fun features, but also a large amount of collabs for talented users to enjoy! Thank you so much Tom for giving us another year of greatness.

Been a great year for us. I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s recaps and they’ve got me excited for what everyone makes in 2025.

Heres another recap for the list by @sjhillustration : https://sjhillustration.newgrounds.com/news/post/1498952

It’s an inspiring read since he goes into how he learned how to make his first game this year starting with no previous experience.

2025 will be sweet in the name of Tom and Wade

I like said before I say this again 2024 was good and bad year in my personal life, but still I feel great now.

Also I'm on the list, what a surprise.

Thank You Mr. Tom Fulp

It's been a hard year, it's also been really good. My favorite event was the Dublin Meet this year! I hold your kindness! Sketches and stickers in extremely high regard—and the laughs! I am immensely grateful!

It was really fun at Tokens. It's sad they closed it. Yeah, it’s a coincidence that there was an NG meet there, and then they immediately closed it afterward. Well, maybe next time we’ll game even harder. We'll see if we can get a place to shut down completely while we're there.

Maith thú

@OmenaKettu @Guardias @matt-likes-swords @HenryEYES @Buster98 @MKMaffo @ChazDude @Speedo @Tango @MapleEllie @DeeDotNG @ryanimateon @Snackers @stillcrisp @s1lky @Thell1 @Carmet

Next month is January, and that means JAMUARY, @Droid!

I'm excited to make more music! And hopefully do more collabs!

There’s so much awesome stuff to learn, and I’m excited for the New Year!

Thank you so much for doing great work organizing the event @sereneFalconer

Seeing the art reveal of the Secret Santa gives so much inspiration!

Super super thank you to @RavioliBox

For creating a Secret Santa, I was the only person who didn’t get one from Group E, so I really appreciate it, Ravi! I want to work hard to become more of an artist like you and be as kind. @LegolaSS, thank you for organizing the Secret Santa for the Group E. Next year, I at least want to be 1% better!

Thank you for being here.

Added!

This year saw some wonderful meetups, site features and upkeep, and submissions!

Have a happy new year, everyone - NG turns THIRTY!!! We’re gonna make it a good anniversary in some way, that I know.

See y’all in April for Flash Forward too!!! Easier than ever to participate with ActionScript 3 support where it is now.

Also, if you, who’s reading this thread right now, have ever been on the fence about being a Supporter - we HAVE enough active users to fund the site fully through its members, fully self-sustaining - Supporter numbers are pretty much steady but it’s not nearly enough to cover all the site costs - if the site’s submissions give you as much joy as a streaming service does, SUPPORT NEWGROUNDS YA DOOFUS!!

…I gotta make an end of year blogpost too, wait uppp everyone! :P

Every year is absolutely packed with things to check out and discover. Newgrounds still remains one of my favorite "old Internet" hubs for creatives from across the globe, and I hope it continues to be so incredibly communal and art-driven in 2025 and beyond. Happy New Year, everyone! Y'all do me a favor and pour a cold one. 🍻

Could we change this bit to say "@BrandyBuizel and @coby hosted a Pico Day Party in New Jersey"

Amazing list of cool events, but I have noticed a thing when clicking on Forest Nature Art Collab, a collab I participated: when I click on it I see an error message saying it has been deleted. I remember that sadly the collab organizer deleted their account. Other than this thanks for this thread because I am discovering many collabs I didn't know they existed. Keep it up!

Hella collabs this year. I knew there were a lot, but scrolling through this made me realize just the sheer magnitude of how pervasive they’ve become.

Hot damn!

can't wait for 2025 >:D

A year chock full of great stuff. Looking forward to 2025 with y'all!

What a great year

It was a tough time for me personally work wise but I saved up enough to move to a better area next year

hopefully I now can have the free time to teach myself a skill like drawing or programming so I can finally contribute to this site!

The Pico Day meetup was quite the experience! Maybe the next time I’ll go to another one of those meetups, I’ll have something to offer!

I released way way way more games this year (as well as my first movie!) despite it being a shitshow for my life for the majority of it, so grateful to NG (which was key in getting my drive back, especially the NJ meetup in 2023.) The squid I was on January 1st 2024 and the squid I'm gonna be on January 1st 2025 are so different and honestly it wouldn't have happened without the NG community.

Ooh I forgot to mention in my first reply, but I love the new site skin playlist!

cool :]

2024 was an action packed year! Can't wait for next year!

this was a great year, here's to the next one being even better!

Happy New Years, Newgrounds ❤️

Oops, I've removed that from the list now. It's a shame when people delete stuff like that; they're deleting history! It bums me out when I revisit old event posts and see "Unpublished Submission" where one of the winners was. Kinda ruins my day. Same when people delete their accounts with years of history.

Fixed that in both this post and the wiki!