Nyan Cat: how the Pop-Tart Cat went viral

On April 2, 2011, a pixel cat with a pastry for a torso started looping through space. A few days later someone glued a Japanese Vocaloid chant onto that GIF, and Nyan Cat — also known as Pop-Tart Cat — began to addict people and torment whoever sat next to the speakers. The soundtrack sounds like it crawled out of Niconico. The drawing did not.

If you have somehow avoided it, Nyan Cat is an 8-bit animation of a gray cat with a cherry Pop-Tart body flying through a starfield, leaving a rainbow behind. The song is annoying and, worse, addictive. From that tiny loop came thousands of versions, games, and the kind of background gag still dropped into videos when someone wants the room to groan on purpose.

How did Nyan Cat originate?

Christopher Torres — better known as prguitarman — posted the GIF on April 2, 2011, on his daily comics site LOL-Comics, from Dallas, Texas. He was 25, drawing on a Red Cross charity livestream, when two people in chat asked for two different things: a Pop-Tart, and a cat. He jammed them together on the spot.

The face belonged to his own Russian Blue, Marty. Torres has said he still thinks of the character as Pop-Tart Cat. The internet had other plans.

On April 5, 2011, YouTube user saraj00n (Sara June) put the GIF under a Japanese loop already bouncing around Niconico: “Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!” Producer daniwell-P had uploaded the original on July 25, 2010, written for Hatsune Miku. The version that went viral was a cover sung by the UTAU voice Momone Momo, uploaded by Momomomo in January 2011. Sara titled the mash-up “Nyan Cat.” CollegeHumor, G4, and a pile of blogs did the rest.

• July 25, 2010 — daniwell uploads “Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!” to Niconico with Hatsune Miku.
• April 2, 2011 — Chris Torres posts the Pop-Tart Cat GIF on LOL-Comics.
• April 5, 2011 — saraj00n uploads the YouTube mash-up titled “Nyan Cat.”

The original YouTube upload passed 200 million views before it was taken private in 2023 and moved to an official Nyan Cat channel. Remixes, ten-hour versions, and copies sit on top of that. “Billions” across the whole internet is a number people like to guess. The figure that can actually be pinned down is the one on that first video.

Why is it called Nyan Cat?

Nyan (にゃん) is the Japanese sound for a cat’s meow — the cute cousin of nya. Once that Vocaloid chant sat on Torres’s GIF, “Pop-Tart Cat” was a mouthful and “Nyan Cat” was obvious. Torres has said he is fine with the internet’s name; he still uses his.

That is also why so many people file it as a Japanese viral. Half of the object really is: the Vocaloid loop, the onomatopoeia, the Niconico pedigree. The other half is a Texan pixel doodle of a breakfast pastry. The meme exists because those two halves were taped together by a third person who was neither the illustrator nor the musician.

Influence, copies, and leftover curiosities

On April 13, 2011, nyan.cat went up. The first version swapped the Pop-Tart for a slice of toast. Torres called it plagiarism; by 2012 the domain was showing his cat, with the non-stop loop and a timer for people who wanted to test how long they could last.

Games arrived almost immediately: endless runners, Snake clones that used the rainbow as a tail, a licensed Nyan Cat Adventure, later a Nintendo Switch rerelease of Nyan Cat: Lost in Space. The mobile game Buffalo Bison Revenge even handed the player a Pop-Tart that turned the bison into a flying rainbow snack for a few seconds.

YouTube itself got involved. In mid-June 2011 the original video got a custom progress bar: a tiny Nyan Cat flying along the scrubber, rainbow and all. On July 5 a player redesign killed it. Windows mods and iOS tweaks tried to bring the bar back on the desktop.

Then there is Slipknot, a rumor people still repeat. The band did not lift Nyan Cat into “Psychosocial.” A commenter told people to mute the official video and play the nyan loop on top of it. The tempos lined up well enough that the comments under Psychosocial filled with nyanyanyanyanya. Confusion did more spreading than any supposed copy.

In 2012 the GIF won a Webby for Meme of the Year. In February 2021 Torres auctioned a remastered Nyan Cat as an NFT on Foundation for 300 ETH, then worth about $590,000. That sale is about who owns a particular file. The loop itself was already a decade old.

Marty died in November 2012. For a while the default animation on nyan.cat was a Sad Nyan Cat: eyes closed, no rainbow. The cheerful loop came back, because that is still what people press play for.

Other cat loops have come and gone — Bongo Cat among them — but Nyan Cat is the one that still sounds like 2011 the second the first nyan hits. Mute it, or let it ride one more loop?