I still remember the first time I heard about Newgrounds.
I was thirteen or so at the time, and I was in the computer labs in my high school, where we'd sometimes go with my friends to play emulated Dragon Ball Z fighting games on the Snes9x[1]. Doing this was a very risky thing at the time, since the lab teacher was an enormously obese cunt of a woman who had two hairy moles on the side of her neck, as if a vampire had bitten into her one night and pierced her beefy skin as she was sleeping, transforming her into someone self loathing and hateful rather than bloodsucking and well... Sparkly, if that's what vampire movies nowadays would have you believe[2].
Anyways, the point is this woman was a real bitch. The only "games" we had in the computer lab were Typing Tutor 7 and Math Blaster. See, when I was a kid in high school, the internet existed, but it wasn't something that everybody had. It was a weird, new thing to everybody. I remember having to periodically go offline when "surfing the web" (As we so tubularly called it) at my house because my mom wanted to use the phone. I remember that one time I wanted to download Harvest Moon for the SNES and I had to wait for around five hours for the game to finally finish downloading. I also remember downloading GetRight, a program that would let you pause and resume downloads much like how torrents are today and thinking myself a genius, since I had shitty internet that would cause downloads to always time out. A little girl would say "Starting to download" once your download began or when the download had finally finished she'd ecstatically say "Your file is DONE!" . That little girl always sounded so happy. I wonder who the hell that girl was.
So yeah, that's why so many typing programs came out at the time, and with them came the typing programs disguised as games. Because nobody aside from secretaries had ever even been near a typewriter and much less a keyboard, so we'd have weekly typing lessons in that lab where we'd be forced to play the typing equivalent of Missile Command, typing words like "Fellow" and "Kwanzaa" in order to shoot missiles upwards to hit the enemy missiles that were being aimed at our futuristic Sim City 2000-esque bubble houses. If you played it on hard you'd get words like "Comprehensive", "Presidentially" and "Acquiesce". I remember one time I heard a group of kids cheering when a guy managed to type out "Mississippi" seconds before the last missile was coming down. Cheering and high fiving each other, it was pretty fucking sad[3].
I never played the Math Blaster games because I suck at math almost as much as I suck at drawing, so fuck that. Seriously, fuck math. I hate it. I even get nervous just looking at a math notebook, looking at those little squares on it. The squares remind me of the laser grid from the first Resident Evil movie, but the little squares aren't made up of lasers; They're made up of teeny tiny little numbers and cosines and binomials and golden ratios and coefficients and unlike the Resident Evil laser grid that cuts you into little human flavored bouillon cubes[4], the math notebook squares infiltrate your brain and make you feel retarded and there's people that LIKE that shit and what the fuck people it's math!
So we were there in the computer lab loading up DBZ Butouden 3 from our floppy disk when suddenly a guy sitting a couple of computers next to us crept up on his computer lab chair with the three wheeled bottom, but one of them always stuck in place for some reason. There was always a wheel that just would not budge, and then there were the chairs that wouldn't go up or down. They'd just stay there, miserably in place. They were too low to comfortably rest your arms on the computer lab table, but they were too high to be able to see the shitty computer screen without lurching forwards and screwing up your back for a week afterwards. Every chair was crappy in some way[5].
So he wheels himself up to where we were and he half whispers "Hey guys, you ever heard about Newgrounds?". We all looked at him confused and told him that no, we hadn't heard of Newgrounds. He called us over to his computer and he told us "Check this out!" and clicked on Pico's School while we patiently waited. And waited. And then waited some more. Until finally the loading was done and then he said "Okay dudes...Check THIS out!" and he clicked the play button. The speakers immediately crunched with a weird warbly voice coming out of Pico's teacher. Someone had been on his computer before and left the volume turned up all the way for the next unlucky person who came along. We all lunged at the huge toaster like speaker and quickly lowered the volume. Our lab teacher stopped eating her bucket of chicken and looked at us huddled in the corner and smiling nervously at her.
I'm guessing the aroma of fried poultry distracted her from what we were doing since she stayed in her seat and the kid continued playing, all of us excitedly watching. I remember seeing him play through the game was kind of like the first time I watched porn. It felt like it was something naughty, since I knew that if we were to get caught we'd all be in deep shit. We all tried to muffle our laughter as he made Pico shoot the ex-Pearl Jam ex-goth now punk kid with a machine gun, and when he grabbed weed out of a locker to regain health. He was nearing the end of the game but our laughter became too much. The lab teacher heard us and sluggishly oozed out of her chair. She turned to us and lumbered slowly.
I remember it was like a movie. She was staggering toward us, each sloshy greasy step getting closer, and we all looked at each other and frantically started clicking the X button on the Netscape Navigator browser over and over; Our initial liking of this cool kid who had showed us this awesome game quickly turning to rage as we imagined ourselves getting into trouble because of this asshole who showed us this piece of shit game that was gonna get us expelled. It didn't matter, though. No matter how much we tried to close that damned browser, it was too late.
The lab teacher came up to our little forbidden flash gaming corner of the room and stood behind us, towering over us in our shitty little lab chairs, the one wheel stuck in place. It was at that moment that she saw it: The words "There has been an error in the program." from Netscape freezing up at the last moment no matter how much we had clicked and tried to close it down, and a shot of Pico shooting up an alien's dick.
Fuck you, Tom Fulp.