Pico’s School: The Flash game about school shooting that changed the Flash Gaming scene… (2024)

Content Warning: School shooting, violence, gore, blood, discussion of racism, hom*ophobia and sexism

[Edited 21/09/2022: Tom Fulp contacted me to add a bit of informations and context about a few key points that I feel is important to add.]

I have a profound respect for people who make games for free. It is still amazing to me to see people from all around the world, amateurs or professionals, making games with little to no monetary goal. There are various reasons for that, but often it is very simple: They make games to be part of a community. Many communities online are created around a technology like Flash or a genre like RPGs or visual novels, and evolve over the years, creating their own identities and refining what makes them unique, to the point where not a single game can be mistaken for being part of anything other than this website. Take, for example, Friday Night Funky, the colorful and absurd rhythm game that became one of the most played web games in 2021. Despite being created at first for a game jam and then published on various websites, it is very clearly a product of the Newgrounds community.

Newgrounds is a website unparalleled in the History of the Internet. It was created before all of the major sites of today such as Youtube and Google, and outlived many more. The website mostly known for its Flash games and animations survived the Internet Bubble Burst, the rise of mobile gaming and even the death of Flash, but in 2020 it was no longer the Internet giant it used to be. Then, Friday Night Funky, FnF for short, released exclusive levels on Newgrounds in early 2021, and the influx of players was so massive it crashed the servers. It is true, FnF did a lot to breathe new life into the website, bringing a whole new generation of internet users to the two decade old community. The game is overtly inspired by the culture of the website, from the art style very reminiscent of Flash animation, to more direct references like the cameos of famous Newgrounds characters, including Pico, “the redhead kid who loves guns”.

If you visited Newgrounds at least once, you know Pico. He is the most recognizable mascot of the website that counts many. He is featured in many games, animations, fanart and so much more, redesigned and reimagined so many times I am willing to bet many young FnF players don’t know the origin of the character. Other players, knowing the origins of the character, are shocked to see his inclusion in a game very popular with kids. I am not here to take a stand about his inclusion in the game, but I can understand the backlash. After all, we cannot avoid talking about it: the character, Pico, was created in 1999 for Pico’s School, a comedic and gory game about school shootings, released three months after the Columbine shooting.

Pico’s School is pivotal in the history of Flash and Indie Games in general. It is also a very juvenile game with a lot of violence, blood and poop. But also a game that would be reinterpreted, remade and turned into an icon of the Newground style of games over the years. And it all started, surprisingly, with a cease and desist from the BBC.

We are in 1999. Tom Fulp, a 21-year-old student from Pennsylvania, is running a personal website where he posts various Flash things, mostly gory interactive animations such as Club a Seal or the Assassin series, which is dedicated to humiliate and kill “self centered celebrities”. The site went by many names until it settled for “Newgrounds”, inspired at first by a fanzine about the Neo Geo. Fulp garnered a bit of attention a year before by receiving a cease and desist from the BBC because of Telebubby Fun Land, a series featuring the Teletubbies doing drugs or having sex. He pulled off the animations of his website but not without publishing an open letter arguing (rightfully) that his creation falls under Fair Use. By this point it was clear that Newgrounds was becoming quite popular. But these creations weren’t really games, they were closer to interactive animations and toys. Fulp had yet to make his big break, a full game in Flash. This would not be an easy task; at the time, the latest version of Flash didn’t include variables or any code. If you are a developer, try to imagine making a game without variables. If you are not a developer, imagine baking a cake while standing in the middle of a field, nowhere near a kitchen or any cooking instrument. But despite the challenge, on July 25th 1999, Tom Fulp released Pico’s School.

On various pages on Newgrounds, in the game description and on a blog post, Tom Fulp had this to say about the game: he had a “lot of angst teen energy” when he made this game, and it was a “nihilistic nod to school shooting”. This feeling was very topical, as the Columbine shooting occurred just three months earlier, and the popular consensus in the media at the time was that violent video games were to blame. Then attorney Jack Thompsons was all over the news, arguing that Columbine and other dramatic events were caused by video games such as Halo or GTA (something an American court of justice would dismiss years later). In 2000, the magazine SPIN published a short interview of Tom Fulp, where he explained that, at the time, he received a lot of emails accusing Newgrounds as a whole of being part of the problem, that his creations encouraged people to cause real life violence. He then said he “decided to make people who blame video games for things like that even more mad”. Now that we set the scene, it is time to answer the question: what happens in Pico’s School?

Pico is a red headed teenager attending a class about apples and bananas. It is a normal boring day in a normal boring school. Until suddenly a goth kid sitting in the back called Cassandra stands up, shouting nonsense about the American educational system, how she listened to goth music all her life and how she hates the state of the world, before revealing a machine gun and shooting people. The game starts shortly after the massacre. Pico is surrounded by corpses of his classmates and teacher, and he has to escape. From the very beginning, the tone is set: it is gonna be gory and absurd.

By today’s standards, the game is very basic. It is mostly a point n’ click. You explore the school, pick up items and solve basic puzzles. In the first few minutes of the game, you find a rifle in a room, which allows you to get into shooting sequences against various bosses. If you play somewhat right, you can finish the game in 15 minutes. The graphics are very crude, most of the characters are potato shaped, and the most elaborate animations are for gunshots and blood splatters. But if the game is indeed barebone for our 2022 vision, in 1999, it was mind bending. If you allow yourself to remember what the Internet at the time used to look like, the simple fact of playing a somewhat long game with various interactive elements, directly on your web browser, was incredible. You could open every locker in the hallway, find weed in one of them that could be used to regain some health. There were a few optional interactions, where you could resolve a conflict against one of the shooters in different ways, the more satisfying one being obviously to kill him. The true power of the game wasn’t the core gameplay; like I said it was very barebone. It was in fact the way the game made itself “believable”, in a way no other Flash games had attempted at the time.

Every step of the way the game balances between the awfully gore and the absurd. Bloody corpses are everywhere, some rooms are even so full of blood you can’t even see anything else. And then in the men’s bathroom, if you open one of the stalls, someone off-screen yells at you and asks you to close the door. If you refuse to do so and keep talking to him, he will literally throw poop at you. One of the bosses is a psychic kid named Alucard. When defeated, he is so scared of you he hides under some chairs, asking you to leave him alone or “he’ll tell his lawyer”. Again, you can optionally kill him. In fact, the game allows the players to indulge in every killing fantasy you want. Each character can be gunned down, whether they are enemies or not. While the game somehow avoided making school shootings look cool, it made killing people very gory and spectacular, a satisfying rush of adrenaline for the player wanting to indulge in pretend killing. Because, at the end of the day, it is just all pretend. These characters are just potato shaped drawings on a screen, the massacre is not real. You are not a wrong person if you indulge in the fictional killing. You cannot even project yourself or “take the role playing seriously” because, let’s be real, the characters are so paper thin there is not much roleplay to get into.

But at the same time, the game has something to say about school shootings. Remember the context in which the game was released, and what Tom Fulp said about it: it was made out of spite for people accusing his creations, and video games in general, of causing violence. Here, the bad guys are the violence obsessed kids, and the game is constantly making fun of them. According to the game, these kids are just entitled kids, their hatred has no basis, and their actions are wrong, not because killing people is wrong (after all you also kill people in the game), but because they are doing it in the name of a stupid nonsensical rebellion through goth music, manufactured by companies to sell them products. For all its shock value, the game seems keen on making a point about violence, and people fantasizing about doing violence in real life. The point is, in the language of the game, something like this: get a life, loser.

The game continues to escalate in absurdity right to the final confrontation with Cassandra, who reveals that she was, in fact, a -ahem- gay alien from a race called the Penilian, and the shooting was the first step in their invasion of Earth. This is, of course, just a pretext for a spectacular finale where Cassandra shapeshifts into a gigantic creature you have to defeat by shooting it on the dick. As stupid and juvenile it is, the final boss fight is still spectacular. The action is tense, you have to damage Cassandra while still being wary of the attacks, there is even a tank of propane you can shoot that will destroy the wall behind the arena, revealing a bunch of police cars. Like anything in the game, it is all optional but awesome when you figure out you can do it. The cops will attack Cassandra, helping you in the fight. Or, as always, you can shoot them and the cars. When she’s defeated and peace is restored in the school, the final cutscene shows a new teacher, a few months later, announcing the arrival of new students to replace the dead ones. They are, -AHEM-, caricatures of black thugs, the kind of caricatures you saw in the late 90s/early 2000s that were already dated at the time. Pico draws his rifle he apparently kept, showing either that he thinks the shooting will start again, or he is just racist.

[Edited 21/09/2022] I don’t have any particular problem with blood and violence, with the poop humor and some dated elements in Pico’s School, but at the same time, I cannot describe the whole game without having some issue about the ending. The intent, according to Tom Fulp, was to poke fun at the moral panic in the medias at the time about busing (bringing kids from disadvantaged schools into suburban schools). Like with the rest of the game, the satire is clear when you put it in context, but over the years it sadly lost the original reference, especially if you were not living in the US at the time.

I would like to end on a nuanced take: I don’t personally know Tom Fulp but I have no doubt the person he was at 21 is not the person he is now. I am not particularly judging him harshly, he is one of many young adults who made provocative content on the Internet. The only difference is that this game was played so many times it helped define a whole generation of Internet teenagers.

Now that we have set the tone, let’s see how it goes from this to Friday Night Funky. Agreed, it is not a straight line, but bear with me. First, something I want to get out of the way immediately: Pico’s School is not the first Flash game ever. BlueSuburbia by Natalie Lawhead, released the same year, although being described as “interactive poetry”, was already a Flash game with many scenes and interactive elements. Also notable are Micky’s Adventures, the French episodic Flash game I already talked about a few times, which was started a year prior. And so was Arcane, the episodic mystery game by Canadian studio Sarbakan and produced by Warner Bros (although the information online is contradictory). I want to start with this because a lot of articles and videos online talking about Flash quote Pico’s School as the first Flash game, and I wanted to clarify it. It is not, and Tom Fulp never pretended it was.

But the belief that it was the first Flash game didn’t appear in a vacuum. This game was an achievement at the time, an immense success and a cultural phenomenon that transpired outside of the web. It is considered the first Flash game because it is the first to achieve some sort of mainstream success. We cannot overstate this, in 2000 it was said that the website was visited on average ten million times each month. Even by today’s standards those are tremendous numbers. Side anecdote: in the same SPIN article mentioned earlier, Tom Fulp said that the game attracted the attention of the movie studio Troma, famous for producing low-budget independent movies such as Toxic Avenger or Tromeo and Juliet. Even more, at some point a Pico’s School movie was in the works for a direct-to-DVD release. It was never mentioned afterward, so nothing came out of it, but a live adaptation of a Flash game would have been huge, especially since it still hasn’t been done today.

Pico’s School is essential for the history of Newgrounds and Newgrounds is essential for the history of Flash. It didn’t encompass the whole history of Flash; obviously there were thousands of different uses of Flash all over the world, each developing their own style. But the “Newgrounds style” was a particular trend of game making, not defined by gameplay or story, but a certain “vibe”, a flavor of transgression, something that would become extremely popular among teenagers, game makers or not. Many indie game developers that started by making Flash games quote Pico’s School as a changing moment in their lives, the moment they realized the true power of Flash. More than being a technical achievement, it made people realize anyone could do it. And this became truer than ever with the Portal.

In april 2000, the Newgrounds Portal, then a simple page listing various Flash toys from Tom Fulp and others creators, became automated, becoming the first collaborative website of the whole Internet, predating DeviantART by a few months. Now everyone could log on, upload a Flash file, a piece of art or a piece of music, and make it available for everyone. Newgrounds finally matured into its final form, a place for animators, game makers, artists and musicians to share everything they wanted. Over the years, the Portal would become incredibly popular, so much so that it took over the whole website, being now the main feature of Newgrounds. Literally hundreds of uploads would be made each day, the most popular ones being the Flash animations and games. It is safe to say it changed the perception of Flash on the Internet as a whole, by creating a very specific brand of gaming, one defined by transgression and shock value, for better or for worse. The slogan of the website reflects this mindset: “Everything, by Everyone”.

Well, not exactly everything. You can upload what you want, it’s true. But it won’t show up on the frontpage immediately. First, it is on a “pending” status, where other users vote and comment, and if the rating is low enough, it is deleted. The goal of the system is to eliminate the content deemed unfit for the website (spam, very low effort publications, etc…) with no systemic internal review by the Newgrounds team. The bar is very low, so bad content can stay on the website, but the weight of each vote is very huge. It is all the community; if the community doesn’t like your content, it is out. So, in context, it is very interesting to check the oldest games and animations on the Portal, because it means it is the content approved by the community at the time. Also, the website seemingly puts no restriction on the kind of content posted (aside from the obviously illegal ones), as long as the user uploading it puts the correct rating, ranging from E to A. The system is still correctly enforced today, making Newgrounds one of the rare instances of a social platform still allowing adult content.

When people talk about how Pico’s School influenced them and inspired them into making Flash games, they mostly talk about the technical aspect of the game. This is all true; making a complex game at the time was a very hard task and Pico’s School showed the way, proving it was possible to make games that told stories with Flash. But as far as I can read on the Internet, people don’t talk about how Pico’s School inspired Flash games spiritually, in terms of content and topic. Remember what I said in the intro? People often make free games to fit into a community. And when that community is born on edgy violent Flash games and animations, what you get is kind of expected. The early history of the Portal is filled with gory games and animations about killing celebrities or characters from TV shows. I would say this is mostly harmless, most of the games are very crude animations made in one day by people with very basic Flash skills. But every once in a while we can see a game probably aspiring to be the next Pico’s School, but without grasping the satire of the game or having the same level of care, and ends up just being a rail shooter featuring a character, often the author’s surrogate, killing and hurting defenseless people.

Teenagers venting about some frustrations and making drawings about killing the people they don’t like is an activity as old as time itself, and the Internet definitely has not enabled this mindset more than anything else. But we also should be wary of who are the targets of these imaginary acts of violence. Obviously, when you are in a mindset where you hate everyone and find a community online creating content about killing those you hate, it can very quickly lead to awful content. For example, the Assassin series, one of the oldest features of Newgrounds that predates Pico’s School, is still being featured in its dedicated category. Wanting to get back at people you see all the time on TV can be cathartic, but it quickly turned to sexism when Britney Spears became the primary target, with hundreds of games allowing us to kill her, way more than any celebrity on the website. There was even a page dedicated completely to her. Making an edgy game about killing celebrities is one thing but singling out a particular one is very concerning, not really different from direct harassment.

What I am describing is not the whole Portal, of course. Many games and animations existed in many forms. The most populars had edgy humor and/or violence, it’s true, but the true abject content never reached a form of popularity on the website, it was just “mediocre yet tolerated content”. And also, it wasn’t a Newgrounds specific problem. Of course Newgrounds wasn’t the only website to produce and showcase awful content; this is not an excuse, rather a way of saying that Newgrounds wasn’t more notably toxic than other websites. The difference being that Newgrounds outlived most of them.

Side note: I won’t talk about the toxicity of the Newgrounds community or the forum. Toxicity is, unfortunately, a common problem of many communities online, and it is very true for Newgrounds, but this is a story too long and way too complex and I am in no way equipped to talk about it. My focus is Newgrounds from the “consumer” point of view, someone who goes to the website without taking part in the community. But be aware it existed and it was a very big issue that didn’t really go away.

Fortunately, over the years, Newgrounds evolved for the better. Of course it took a lot of time, but the games and animations that garnered the most attention slowly became less the one with shock value, and more the one that offered a unique experience just like Pico’s School did in 1999. Games and animations became longer, more complex. The bar of quality was greatly raised, starting the career of many talented people, but also probably dissuading a lot of people from making games, afraid their creations wouldn’t compete. Also, the featured content on the front page, hand picked by the moderation team, are usually rated E or T.

And with every change, Pico the character stayed. On top of every official and unofficial sequels to Pico’s School (including a now defunct multiplayer russian roulette), Newgrounds inaugurated in 2006 Pico Day. To celebrate the portal and its history, each year, on April 30th, Newgrounds creators were encouraged to submit games, animations and drawings related to Pico and his friends. And like everything else on the website, each year the games and animations became more complex, more polished, less edgy. Pico, the teenage survivor of a school shooting, became a trope more than a character, with backstory and relationships that could be bent and rearranged to fit any purpose. His original design, recognizable yet very basic, was refined, finally becoming the iconic mascot everyone knows: Pico, the kid who loves guns, starring in literally hundreds of games, from shooters to action platformers, point and click adventure or even dating simulators. He represents Newgrounds, and what Newgrounds became wasn’t the shock website it used to be. It was a driving force for a creative community.

Which brings us to 2021. Despite a decline in popularity because of the rise of social media and the ubiquity of casual gaming, Newgrounds was still a place for everyone to upload games and animations. The Flash plugin was discontinued the year before, but the site planned the future ahead, allowing users to upload any kind of browser games of any technology. This is the year FnF was published on the website, a game made with the HaxeFlixel engine, but you could absolutely believe it was a Flash game, from the animation style to the tone of the game giving a “Flash vibe”. Tom Fulp said in a blog post that the game “reinvigorated” the interest of the public for web games. It is hard to deny; web games never went away, but it was the first mainstream success of a free browser game in a while. Games on the frontpage of Newgrounds often struggled to reach 100.000 views, while FnF is sitting currently at more than 60 million views. And, like I said at the beginning of the article, it brings a whole new generation of users to the website, teenagers born after the creation of the website and discovering it often for the first time.

This is entirely speculation but I get the feeling that the current Newgrounds team wants to make clear that the website it is now is not the website it used to be, and take some distance from the early content. They never went as far as deleting it, like with everything else they leave that to the community. But you can clearly feel the change in the tone of the website. The only concrete proof I have is the fact that in 2021 they removed the paginations of the Portal, opting for a dynamic loading of a page. And because you cannot sort the games by making the oldest appear first, scrolling to the very bottom of the list is a virtually impossible task. The oldest games are still present and you can still find them, but there is very little chance that a new user would stumble upon them at random. [Edit 21/09/2022] However there is a feature that allow the user to display games and animations released during between two day set by the user, meaning you can, for example, find which games came out on a specific day. This is a very useful yet easily overlooked feature.

But saying that Newgrounds is ashamed of its early history is an oversimplification. The website has a Wiki section about the whole story of the website. The early classic games, even the edgy ones, are featured on dedicated pages, such as the Pico games. The Assassin series is still here, however the earliest game has been lost, and the rest is divided into sub pages for every celebrity, probably to show the diversity of the game and not single out a particular individual. Pico Day is still celebrated each year, with hundreds of games, animations and arts produced to celebrate the early history of the site. They even partnered with the team behind the Flash emulator Ruffle, making it a default option for every game on the website, even the ones forgotten years ago. Newgrounds has a rich history full of games of all sorts, and their strategy seems to be: make them all playable indiscriminately, but only if you know how to find them. If you are new to the website, you better check the more recent content. The rest is probably for nostalgic users or people curious about the early Internet.

Today, Newgrounds still has a somewhat good reputation on the Internet in general. There hasn’t been an uproar against Newgrounds in a long time, aside from callout of specific users. But the existence of the early content doesn’t cause controversy, mainly because no one cares. Nobody plays them anymore aside from the people who know them already. I guess this article might give the impression of a callout against Newgrounds, but in reality I believe removing the early content would make no difference aside from attracting attention to it. You can’t rewrite history, and it is not the right thing to try to sweep it under the rug.

But what about Tom Fulp? While still managing the website (now a company with many employees) dutifully taking part in the community, posting blog posts and highlights of the Portal regularly, he is now also running The Behemoth, a game studio he co-founded with Dan Paladin in 2003. And this is all because of another Flash game, released almost exactly twenty years ago: Alien Hominid.

While Pico’s School is pivotal for the history of Flash games, Alien Hominid is pivotal for the History of Video Games, period. This short run-and-gun made by Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin was a massive hit and a huge step up from Pico’s School, despite being released only three years later. Beautiful graphics and animations, responsives controls and a plethora of details, this game shown to the world Flash games had the potential to compete with commercial games. This is probably why the two creators decided a year later to create the studio The Behemoth in order to turn the prototype into a full commercial game. When the game was released in 2004, the indie gaming scene was way different, almost nonexistent on consoles. After all, we were years away from the Xbox Live arcade or the Wii’s eshop. There were exceptions of course, but Alien Hominid, an indie game coming from the Flash gaming scene having a retail release on console was a very big deal. This led four years later to the release of their following game, Castle Crasher, which was an immense commercial success and for some the true beginning of the Indie Revolution.

Tom Fulp made many games, dozens even. Some good, a few great, and some terrible. But with Alien Hominid we can see how Tom Fulp grew as a game maker. This game retained the same irreverence as Pico’s School, but it was more focused, leaning on cartoon violence and absurd situations. It is no less violent, it might be even more, but to my knowledge no one dares to call it edgy or shocking. Again, I don’t know Tom Fulp personally, I am talking about the observable facts, the games he worked on. And by all accounts we can say: Tom Fulp finally figured out what game he wanted to make, and managed to make it, resulting in some absolutely amazing titles that still stand up.

But the story of Pico’s School doesn’t end here, in the most surprising way. A few months after the release of FnF, Tom Fulp made a blog post about not being satisfied with the original Pico’s School. He said that since FnF had made Newgrounds popular for a younger audience, he felt like Pico’s School was ‘sort of lacking’. He then announced that he developed in secret a new version of Pico’s School, replacing the old one. He said it was the final version, the one that achieved his original vision… On April 1st. You guessed it, it was an elaborate April’s fool like the Newgrounds team love to do, but instead of a prank game ending abruptly with a silly punchline like the other years, this one had, to the surprise of everyone, a lot of depth.

This new version would be later called Love Conquers All and be made available side by side with the original game. It starts exactly the same as the original, boring class, Cassandra stands up with a rifle, shouting about goth music. Then, things take a surprising turn when Pico interrupts her and says he likes goth music too… Instead of killing everyone, she engages in some small talk with Pico about their taste in music. Pico then asks her to hang out with him, in order to relax and let go of her hate. The game is then a simple stroll around the school, every character and antagonist are in the same place, but no violence ever occurs. Seeing the characters you know being canonically reframed is a weirdly comforting experience. Each antagonist reveals their personal issues that led them to take part in the original shooting, like having abusive parents, or being bullied, and Pico comforts them by connecting with them a little bit. And, to complete the loop, the game ends with a cameo of Boyfriend from Friday Night Funky as Pico’s ex, confirming a long standing fan theory of FnF.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say this version is an “apology” for the original game, even though it acknowledges and apologizes for the hom*ophobia of the first games. In the language of Love Conquers All, it is more a way to show how things have changed since 1999, reframing Pico’s School as a silly product of its time more than an actual statement. Moving past the “angst teen energy”, this version shows it is way more meaningful to connect with your peers than to reject them. It is a way nicer conclusion than in the original game. Whether you take this as genuine or insincere is up to you. Personally it feels very sincere and that makes it a nice, weird experience that kinda concludes the whole “Flash era” of Newgrounds.

The history of Newgrounds is still being written. The website is up and running while being still financially independent, being supported by ad revenues and donations from users. It inspired so many game makers that went on to release some of the most successful indie games, and it probably will inspire many more. I have written many unkind things about this website, but I think in many ways it did more good than it did harm. Of course this is a biased point of view, because I was never on the receiving end of the content of the sites. Many creators thrived while many were probably ignored or worse because they came from different backgrounds. I took part in the community very recently, and only to post my games and not interact much with the comments or the forum. If I had been part of this community years ago, I am sure this would have been a very different article.

But I also try to remember the feeling of being 13, going on this website that felt a little bit like a forbidden territory because of the mature content. I remember playing so many different games, watching so many animations, opening my mind to a new world of creativity. Newgrounds did indubitably a lot to shape me into the person I am today, with my obsession for web games and weird interactive experiences. I also remember playing Pico’s School, a game that left an impression on me at the time despite not being as advanced as some other games I was playing on the Internet at the same time. It was gory, humorous, confusing because I didn’t know english, but definitely felt like a real game with a true sense of spectacle and escalation.

I wanted to write this article back in 2021 when I saw a video online of a kid’s birthday with walking characters of Boyfriend from FnF, and Pico. It was so weird to see a character I associated with school shooting being celebrated by kids not older than 10. This character was created 23 years ago to mock people accusing videogames of causing violence, and now it was included in a game, not completely devoid of violence, but definitely with a very happy and optimistic tone, colorful and absurd, and at the end of the day, pretty good. Between its creation and its inclusion in FnF, Pico had an impressive career, but in the end the character is not important, it is all the developers and artists giving it life that allowed it to make it happen. Not many people can brag about changing the course of Video Game History. I don’t think Tom Fulp would do that however, because in the end, Newgrounds was not a sole man effort. It was everyone’s.

Thanks to Francis Janvier and Purple Sea for the very useful proofreading.

• https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/310349
• https://web.archive.org/web/20080706125923/http://www.webgamemagazine.com/2007/05/04/100th-review-picos-surprise-party/
• https://pico.fandom.com/wiki/Pico%27s_School
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico%27s_School
• https://newgrounds.fandom.com/wiki/History_of_Newgrounds
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1UZE8hPqc8
• http://www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/a-short-history-of-flash-the-forgotten-flash-website-movement-when-websites-were-the-new-emerging-artform
• https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/events-and-entertainment/end-of-an-era-flash-games-3268327
• https://tomfulp.newgrounds.com/news/post/1253016
• https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/about-newgrounds/history/stories/toxic-avenger-4
• https://books.google.fr/books?id=ta0nQqYx2t0C&pg=PA54&dq=Tom+fulp&hl=fr&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjQuey2k5n5AhWC16QKHSKhAVYQ6AF6BAgCEAI#v=onepage&q=Tom%20fulp&f=false
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Fulp
• https://medium.com/@SeanBuckelew/newgrounds-64831b97a5a8
• https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/how-flash-games-shaped-the-internet/383136/
• https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1467214
• https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/787272
• https://web.archive.org/web/20080224051331/https://www.newgrounds.com/collection/assassin
• https://www.newgrounds.com/tubby/netfreedom.html
• https://blog.thebehemoth.com/2022/08/07/alien-hominids-20th-anniversary/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Hominid