figure animation and flash games. At the height of its popularity, stickpage.com had nearly one million visitors per month. July 13, 2003: Newgrounds.com user "IGSDann" publishes the Flash game "A true stick death", rapidly increasing the popularity of the genre. Later that year, user "qwerqwer1234" releases "mudah.swf", a comedic series of fight sequences inspired by the Japanese manga series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. December 7, 2003: "壁破き", or "Stickman vs Wall", an animation video in which a stick figure uses increasingly elaborate and insane methods and tools to break down a wall, is released, marking the beginning for an entire sub-genre within the stick animation community. 2004: Armor Games, another major Flash sites, goes online. June 2, 2005: The original "Storm the House" survival Flash game is posted for the first time on Addicting Games by user "IvoryDrive". September 2005: The famous webcomic xkcd, which uses stick figures in humorous contexts often relating to science, philosophy, technology and internet culture, debuts. 2005-2016 On December 3, 2005, Adobe Systems Inc. acquired the entirety of Macromedia, once again rebranding Macromedia's now ubiquitous Flash software. Almost a decade earlier, Adobe had turned down an offer to buy FutureSplash in favor of their own Acrobat system. Now, the tables had turned and the corporation was buying flash's new owner for USD 3.4 billion. With this acquisition, the program entered its final and most recognizable stage of development. Adobe spearheaded Flash animation for the next decade and a half, and it was during this period that Flash facilitated some of the most recognizable stick figure animations and games of all time. Animator vs. Animation Created by animator, YouTuber, and artist Alan Becker, the first episode of "Animator vs. Animation" premiered on newgrounds.com on June 3, 2006. It showed a stick figure fighting to break out of the animation program it was created in. The video has garnered over 70 million views since its publication. As of 2021, the series contains five main episodes and a number of spin-offs, among them include the video "Animation vs. Minecraft", which has gained over 278 million views as of January 2022. In total, all of Alan Becker's animation videos were watched over three billion times with the vast majority of them being centered around stick figure animation. Pivot Animator While Adobe Flash was at every point in time the most popular Flash animation tool, there were other competitors, most notably