History of the Clock Crew

Origins

Newgrounds was founded by Tom Fulp in 1995 as a personal website for sharing creative work. By 2000, Fulp had launched an automated Flash Portal that allowed users to upload their own Macromedia Flash animations and games — effectively creating a "YouTube before YouTube" for interactive content.[7][11] The portal featured a democratic judgment systemwhere community members voted on new submissions; those that scored below a threshold were "blammed" (deleted), while survivors remained permanently on the site.

Into this ecosystem arrived a user known as Coolboyman, who began flooding the Flash Portal with intentionally provocative, low-quality animations — submissions with titles like "Donald Duck Porno" and "Dickey Mouse" — designed to antagonize the community. All were promptly blammed. Undeterred, Coolboyman created a new account: StrawberryClock.[3][5]

The Movie "B"

"B" as it appears on the Newgrounds portal. The submission consisted of a single frame.

On August 15, 2001, StrawberryClock submitted a Flash movie titled simply "B". The submission consisted of a single static frame displaying a red letter "B" alongside a picture of a strawberry — deliberately minimal, with no animation whatsoever. Previous submissions under the StrawberryClock name (including one titled "A") had been swiftly blammed by the community.[2][5]

Against all expectations, "B" survived judgment. While it received predictably low scores, it passed the deletion threshold and was awarded Turd of the Week — a Newgrounds accolade for the lowest-scoring submission to survive. StrawberryClock promptly declared himself the "King of the Portal".[2][3][5]

The date of "B"'s submission — August 15 — would later be enshrined as Clock Day, one of the most enduring annual traditions in Newgrounds history.[6]

Formation of the Crew

The unexpected survival of "B" attracted immediate attention. Users began creating accounts with "Clock" appended to food items and objects: OrangeClock, PineappleClock, RaspberryClock, and AppleClockwere among the first. While StrawberryClock served as the movement's catalyst, it was OrangeClockwho organized the group into a formal collective — designing the first crew logo, establishing aesthetic conventions, and defining what it meant to be a "Clock" character.[3][4][5]

In 2002, the community launched ClockCrew.net, an SMF-based forum that became the crew's primary gathering point outside Newgrounds. At its peak, the forum hosted hundreds of active members and accumulated over 700,000 posts across dozens of boards — serving as the organizational hub for collaborations, WIPs, lore-building, and the distinctive community culture.[14]

Style & Identity

The Clock Crew developed a distinctive visual and auditory language that set them apart from other Newgrounds creators:

Clock-face characters: Members created avatars consisting of everyday objects (typically fruits and vegetables) with an analog clock serving as the face. These characters often had simple stick-figure limbs or moved as if by an unseen force — a style born from limited animation skills that became an intentional aesthetic choice.[3][5]

Speakonia & text-to-speech: Speakonia was a relatively obscure text-to-speech program that the Clock Crew adopted as their signature voice engine. Its robotic, monotonous delivery became inseparable from the crew's identity. Some members also used AT&T Natural Voices for higher-fidelity TTS dialogue. The use of synthesized speech was both a practical workaround (most members were teenagers without recording equipment) and a deliberate stylistic choice that enhanced the absurdist tone.[3][5]

Clocktopia:In the crew's shared lore, the Clock characters inhabited a fictional realm called Clocktopia, with StrawberryClock depicted as its bumbling, self-proclaimed king. This world-building provided narrative scaffolding for collaborative movies and serial content.[4][5]

Absurdism and anti-humor:While early submissions were intentionally low-quality provocations, the crew's humor evolved into a distinctive brand of absurdist comedy — non-sequiturs, meta-references, and deliberately jarring tonal shifts became hallmarks of the Clock aesthetic.

The Golden Age (2002–2005)

Between 2002 and 2005, the Clock Crew entered its most productive and culturally significant period. Members produced increasingly ambitious Flash animations, pioneering the collab movie format — large-scale compilation films featuring dozens of individual segments contributed by different members. These collabs became a defining feature of the group and influenced how collaborative content was organized on Newgrounds for years to come.[1][3]

The CCTV (Clock Crew Television) series represented the peak of this collaborative ambition. CCTV2 (2007), while slightly after the golden age core, featured contributions from over 50 animators and was one of the largest collaborative projects in Newgrounds history at the time.[1]

Forum culture at ClockCrew.net thrived during this period, characterized by in-jokes, drama, art threads, and a uniquely chaotic creative energy. Many members were teenagers finding their voice through Flash animation — the low barrier to entry (clock-face characters were simple to draw, Speakonia eliminated the need for voice actors) meant that nearly anyone could participate and learn.

Clock Day

Every August 15, Clock Crew members celebrate Clock Day — the anniversary of "B" — with collaborative animations on the Newgrounds portal.

Clock Day is celebrated annually on August 15to commemorate the submission of "B". First observed in 2002, it quickly became one of Newgrounds' most distinctive annual events.[6]

On Clock Day, members historically flooded the portal with Clock-themed submissions, creating a "goodwill" atmosphere where many users voted favorably to help submissions pass judgment. While early celebrations were characterized by mass-submission tactics, the event gradually evolved into a genuine creative tradition featuring increasingly elaborate collaborative projects.[6]

Newgrounds began formally supporting Clock Day in 2005, advertising it in advance, creating site-wide banners, and hosting official competitions. The holiday continues to be observed to this day — Clock Day 2024 marked the 23rd anniversary, and Clock Day 2025marked the 24th, with fresh collaborations like the annual "Clocks of the BBS" series.[1][6]

Rivalries & Offshoots

The Clock Crew's success spawned an entire "crew culture" on Newgrounds, with numerous groups forming to emulate, parody, or antagonize the original collective.[3][5]

The Lock Legion, founded in 2003 by a user named StrawberryLock, was the most significant rival. Lock characters used padlock-themed avatars and celebrated their own Lock Day on May 26. The Clock-Lock rivalry fueled creative output on both sides, though many members participated in both communities. The dynamic was as much a creative catalyst as a genuine antagonism.[5][8]

Other offshoots followed naming patterns inspired by the originals — gun-themed groups like the Glock Group, Uzi Union, and Luger League proliferated, alongside broader crews like the Star Syndicate and Soup Squad.[3]

Notable Works

Notable Members

Many Clock Crew members leveraged their community involvement into professional careers in animation, game design, streaming, and broader internet culture.[3]

Perhaps most remarkably, the pseudonymous Twitter personality @dril — one of the most influential accounts in internet culture — was a Clock Crew member under the name DrunkMagiKoopa. Similarly, Vinny from Vinesauce, a widely popular gaming streamer, was a Clock under the name ZidaneX.[15][16]

Evolution & Diaspora

As the founding generation matured through the late 2000s, the explosive growth period gave way to a more measured pace. Many members — now in their twenties — pursued professional careers in animation, game development, and web design, skills directly honed through years of Flash experimentation within the crew.[3]

The rise of YouTube (2005), the proliferation of mobile browsersthat didn't support Flash, and the broader shift toward HTML5gradually eroded Flash's dominance as the web's interactive medium. Newgrounds adapted, but the era of Flash animation collectives as a cultural force began to fade.

In 2017, ClockCrew.net transitioned to a read-only archive, preserving its hundreds of thousands of posts as a digital time capsule. Active discussion migrated to Discord servers and social media, though the archive remains a treasure trove of early internet creative culture.[14]

Flash Preservation

On December 31, 2020, Adobe officially ended support for Flash Player, threatening to render the entire corpus of Clock Club animations — and all Flash content across the web — inaccessible in modern browsers.[10][11]

Newgrounds, under Tom Fulp's leadership, became the primary champion of Flash preservation. The platform adopted Ruffle, an open-source Flash Player emulator written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly. Originally created by Mike Welsh in 2016 (initially called "Fluster"), Ruffle enables Flash SWF files to run natively in modern browsers without the original plugin.[9][10]

Newgrounds began sponsoring Ruffle's development in 2019 and established a Flash Preservation Crew to test and report compatibility issues. Other platforms including the Internet Archive, Armor Games, and Coolmath Games followed suit. Thanks to these efforts, the vast library of Clock Crew animations remains playable for future generations.[10]

Cultural Impact

The Clock Crew's influence extends well beyond Newgrounds. Elements from the community have appeared in commercial media: The Behemoth's Castle Crashers (whose developers had roots in Newgrounds), Adult Swim's Mr. Pickles, and Warner Bros.' Dying Light all contain Clock Crew references or elements created by former members.[3][12]

More broadly, the Clock Crew pioneered several concepts that became standard in online creative communities: the organized crew/collective model, the collaborative compilation format, the use of text-to-speech as artistic tool, and the idea of community-specific holidays that platforms formally recognize. Their approach to collaborative content creation predated modern creator collectives by over a decade.

The group's trajectory — from deliberate provocation through collaborative creativity to professional development — serves as one of the earliest documented examples of an internet community functioning as an informal apprenticeship system for creative careers.[3]