Every era of gaming has had its gatekeepers. The arcades had the operators who decided which cabinets earned a spot on the floor. The consoles had the publishers who chose what shipped. And for a good decade of the early internet, that job belonged to something far scrappier and a lot more democratic: the web-game portal, a single page where more or less anyone could upload a game and millions of strangers could stumble onto it. It is easy to forget now, but long before the app store, the browser was where most of us found our next favourite thing to play. And here’s the part worth holding onto, the sort of half-buried history this section loves digging into: those portals shaped preference first based on which games they decided to highlight.
Before the app store, there was the portal
The one that set the template was Newgrounds. It started life in the mid-90s as a teenager’s fanzine named after the Neo Geo and by 1999 had a section called the Portal for creators to show off half-finished experiments. Then, in 2000, founder Tom Fulp automated the uploads so anything submitted went live at once, and a modest fansite turned into one of the busiest gaming destinations on the internet. The front page, the ratings, and the daily picks was curated and it decided what millions of people saw first.
Others clocked the same trick. Armor Games and Kongregate turned up in the mid-2000s, signing creators to exclusive deals and piling on badges, rankings, and featured slots to keep everyone coming back. Kongregate’s co-founder Emily Greer later called Flash “the original indie scene”, and she wasn’t wrong. This was where a whole generation worked out that a game could reach players directly, with no publisher sitting in the middle.
Where careers were made
Back in August 2002, Fulp and artist Dan Paladin uploaded a scrappy little Flash shooter called Alien Hominid, and when it took off, they spun up a studio, The Behemoth, and rebuilt it for consoles, with Castle Crashers and BattleBlock Theater to come. That story kept repeating: a rough Flash prototype called Meat Boy grew into the much-loved Super Meat Boy. Land the right slot on the right page, and a weekend project could become a career.
The portals bred whole genres as well as careers, and some of them outlived Flash entirely. Tower defence was sharpened on those front pages before the mobile giants ran off with it. So were the motorbike-stunt games, that endless Flash-portal supply of two-wheeled obstacle courses and backflip-for-glory runs, including RedLynx’s Flash-era Trials games. That formula never fell out of fashion either. Moto X3M is a slicker descendant of the very same idea, all saw blades, collapsing ramps, and mid-air flips against the clock.
When the plug was pulled
None of it was built to last, mind. When Apple left Flash off the iPhone in 2007 the slow decline began, and Adobe eventually switched Flash off for good at the end of 2020, blocking the plug-in a fortnight later. Thousands of games that lived only inside that technology were suddenly staring down oblivion. What kept the browser alive as a place to play was the open web finally catching up: HTML5 and its sister standards could now pull off in a plain tab what Flash used to. The portals that survived were the ones that rebuilt on top of it.
The tastemaker’s second life
The role never really vanished; it just changed outfits. At one end of today’s web sit the open free-for-alls, where anyone can publish and discovery is mostly left to tags, ratings, and word of mouth. At the other end sits the curated catalogue, the direct descendant of that old Newgrounds front page, where a human still decides what gets seen.
The through-line is easy to spot once you start looking. Whatever lands a prime slot on a modern front page still shapes what millions of us end up playing, exactly as those Flash portals once did. The tab open on your screen is nudging your next favourite thing, whether you clock it or not.
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