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A corner of the web where anyone could upload a game, the community voted, and you could lose hours flicking through hand-coded animations and wildly unpolished experiments. Flash game sites were the internet's scrappy basement arcade.
One of the internet's first viral megahits: a webcam clip of a New Jersey teenager lip-syncing and flailing joyfully to a Moldovan pop song. Gary Brolsma's "Numa Numa Dance" spread to hundreds of millions of views — and it happened before YouTube even existed.
A thin green man with lettuce for fingers who loves the feel of rusty spoons, speaks in a whisper, and lives alone in a dead, bleached world. David Firth posted the first Salad Fingers episode to Newgrounds in July 2004, and a generation of kids who watched it in a computer lab has never quite recovered.