Tom Fulp

Newgrounds

Newgrounds was originally a Neo Geo fanzine not intended for the web under the name of "New Ground", Tom Fulp was only 13 at the time and had only 100 subscribers. New Ground was packed with comics, games reviews and tips. Newgrounds first became a web page in 1995 whilst Tom was at high school under the name of "New Ground Remix", it was a basic web page with Tom's own games. Many famous flashes on Newgrounds were originally created by Tom, for example "Club a Seal" and "Assassin"; these were released on "New Ground Remix".

In 1998 Tom started using Flash and started showcasing his Flash work on a newer version of the site named "New Ground Atomix" until near the end of 1998 the web page was re-released under the name still used today "Newgrounds". The site started to recieve a lot of traffic and recieved global attention so other Flash creators began requesting their work to be showcased on the site; the birth of "Pico's School" came in this time period.

In 2000 Newgrounds upgraded - and became the first ever automated flash portal allowing anyone to submit Flash files as well as there being community friendly features such as message boards and chat rooms. The site began to pick up a whole load of traffic and became too hard for Tom to maintain on his own so he hired friends to help him. In 2002 the Newgrounds web site was optimized and tweaked so that it ran much smoother.

In April 2003 Tom Fulp co-founded The Behemoth however still continued to manage the Newgrounds web page. July 2003 featured yet another site re-design which was released whilst Tom was working on Alien Hominid. 2004 was when Newgrounds really started to earn cash, it was in the process of finding it's own office as well as full-time employees. Advertisements was the main source of money and the high traffic required constant server upgrades - by the end of 2004 the site was consuming 500mbps of bandwidth. Late 2004 also featured the original release of the world famous "Numa Numa Dance" video.

2005 was when Newgrounds finally had it's own office where all the Newgrounds employees would be managing content and creating flash games daily. In addition it was also the year that Newgrounds opened their audio portal for musicians to submit their created music and audio files. The site was now exceeding 800mbps bandwidth usage at peak hours. 2006 started with a slightly tweaked logo and Tom and Dan won an award for their "Dan'n Me" flash game.

Newgrounds is now much bigger then Tom ever expected it to be and is now one of the most well known flash portals on the web. The staff are constantly attending some of the biggest gaming events such as Comic-Con and the Penny Arcade Expo with their own seperate booths for both Newgrounds and The Behemoth.

The Behemoth

On April 1st 2003 Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin teamed with some of Dan's co-workers to form The Behemoth. They started working on a console version of the Flash game Alien Hominid, they worked on this project for just over a year before it was released on various different platforms on November 18th 2004. Console developing was a big step up from Flash game creating, Tom often worked 16 hours a day which also required sleeping at the office; he also paid many visits to San Diego to meet various people in the games industry as well as attending E3 in Los Angeles.

In March 2005 Alien Hominid recieve three awards at the Independent Games Festival. At Comic-Con in July 2005 The Behemoth announced their new console game now known to us as Castle Crashers. Castle Crashers was later released on the Xbox Live Marketplace on August 27th 2008.

The Behemoth are due to release a 3rd game, BattleBlock Theater, sometime in 2010.