“Originally, I would do animation on an Amiga with Deluxe Paint and then move it over to a PC to program with Pascal, but I always thought, ‘Why can’t I connect my animations to my code?’ There was never an easy way to do that.
“Flash was the first software that did what I'd always been dreaming of growing up,” Fulp says. Then one day, a friend told Fulp about Flash. The young programmer achieved a small amount of internet notoriety with two early hits: Club A Seal, which let players click on pictures of seals to club them, and Assassin, which allowed users to assassinate popular celebrities. Using HTML and Javascript, Fulp did just that. Through, Fulp met like-minded gamers who weren’t content merely absorbing the latest gaming blockbusters – they were eager to make their own games. Fulp had no idea at the time, but his simple collection of message boards would eventually grow into one of the largest wells of free online games.
However, when Fulp went to register the domain, he discovered that the name had already been taken, so he simply added an “S” and hit submit. As Fulp explored programming as a hobbyist, he moved his fanzine online and eventually created a series of websites. Fulp called his little magazine New Ground, which was a literal translation of the console’s Latin name. When he was only 13-years-old, Tom Fulp started a fanzine for the ill-fated Neo Geo console. While no one was watching, Flash became one of the most important programing languages in the video game industry and sparked the indie game revolution.īreaking New Ground: The Birth Breaking New Ground Aspiring game developers created early versions of indie hits like Super Meat Boy, Bejeweled, VVVVVV, and Kingdom Rush. Flash games became a billion-dollar business as sites like Newgrounds, Armor Games, and Kongregate attracted millions of users. Amateur programmers across the world took this software – initially built for graphic designers and started making games. In the early part of the new millennium, Flash became the backbone for nearly every major video player and website, including YouTube, Hulu, and BBC Online.
FutureSplash Animator was eventually shortened to Flash, and it came to dominate the internet.īy the end of the decade, 99 percent of online computers ran Flash. To solve this problem, a group of engineers at FutureWave Software took a program, originally designed for drawing on tablet computers, and transformed it into a vector graphics animation tool that allowed animated images to swim through phone lines. But access to that information was slow – it took nearly 10 minutes to download a single song – and web designers were in a constant battle to build splashy websites that didn’t cripple dial-up modems. During the ’90s, the internet slowly grew into a massive web of information that eventually reshaped entire industries.
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