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One day during the summer of 2006, when I was on summer break from school, I was browsing Newgrounds when I happened upon the leaderboard for experience points accumulated on user accounts. I noticed that the top spot was occupied by fellow named Pimp, whose simple username immediately stuck in my memory; I also noticed that, at the time, the highest positions all belonged to users whose accounts were among the oldest on the site, having been registered in the middle of December 1999, which, apparently, was when Newgrounds first introduced accounts. Afterwards in 2006—and even at times during the late 2000s, when I had stopped regularly visiting Newgrounds—I would sporadically check the leaderboard out of interest, and each time, I recall, I once again saw Pimp holding the top rank.
Pimp's account was not the always the one with the most experience points on Newgrounds: various Internet Archive captures of the leaderboard from, for example, 5 August 2002, 3 December 2003, 16 September 2004, and 1 November 2005 show that the #1 position was held for a few years by humantarget52 (who appears to have abandoned his account sometime in late 2007). Things seem to have stabilized sometime in 2006, though, with Pimp remaining secure in his top spot for the rest of the 2000s; in addition, a cursory inspection on my part of captures of the leaderboard throughout the 2010s suggests that Pimp held on to the top ranking throughout that decade. It was only on 10 March 2020 that, surprisingly, he finally lost the #1 spot to the user bomb, who had been in second place behind him for something like 13 years. Pimp then reattained the top ranking from bomb on 1 July 2020 (and maybe on other dates, too—I certainly haven't checked every capture), but at some point afterwards he lost it again, because as of January 2021 (when this page was first written and published), the leaderboard shows that Pimp is again in second place behind bomb.
Though he lost his #1 spot in March 2020, and is currently (as of January 2021) behind bomb, for a long time (around 14 years) he was the highest-ranked user on Newgrounds in terms of experience points, and as a consequence he attained a good degree of fame on the site. I certainly knew about him, and even Wikigrounds has an article concerning Pimp (which remarks, among other things, that he was the first user to reach level 60), despite the fact that, in his 20+ years on the site, he has made relatively few BBS posts and contributed to only one obscure Flash animation. His great achievement is doubtless his persistence, continuing for over two decades and counting, in logging in to his Newgrounds account every day (or nearly every day), voting on submissions, and thus earning his daily experience points. I read one comment online that remarked that Pimp is truly the Sisyphus of our time
, and I am tempted somewhat to agree, for his efforts are all for the sake of a position on a leaderboard which might give him a little bit of e-fame amongst the community of a single Web site. Even so, however, I cannot help but feel some admiration and respect for his incredible perseverance: where other highly ranked users' accounts have, over the years, disappeared from the leaderboard due to their losing interest in collecting points, Pimp—and also his longtime rival bomb, who should not be forgotten—has for all this time remained steadfast in his commitment to his ranking.
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This page last modified on 1 May 2021.