Nyan Cat

Origin

Nyan Cat is two separate creations that the internet fused together.

The image came first. On April 2, 2011, the artist Christopher Torres, posting as prguitarman, drew an animated GIF of a cat with the body of a Pop-Tart trailing a rainbow through space. It was made during a Red Cross charity drawing session, where donors suggested subjects — someone asked for a Pop-Tart, someone else asked for a cat, and Torres combined them. The cat’s face was modelled on his own Russian Blue, Marty.

The sound came from elsewhere: a Japanese song built on a looping, chirping vocal, performed with vocal-synthesis software.

On April 5, 2011, a YouTube user combined the two — the looping GIF, the looping song — and uploaded the result. It took more than a million views in its first two weeks.

What it means / how it’s used

Nyan Cat has no joke and no meaning. It is a loop: a perfectly repeating animation over a perfectly repeating song, designed to continue indefinitely.

That is precisely why it worked. Its uses were mostly about endurance and excess:

• Ten-hour versions, and versions timed to absurd lengths.
• Endurance challenges — how long a viewer could keep it playing.
• Ports and recreations in games, hardware, and programming demos.
• Use as a stand-in for pure, content-free internet joy.

It became one of the defining artifacts of a specific era of the web: cheerful, pointless, and completely divorced from any commercial intent.

How it spread

Growth was almost instantaneous. By April 10, 2011 the video had been picked up by BuzzFeed, Tumblr, and Facebook, and by April 12, 2011 it was appearing on television — featured by Tosh.0, CollegeHumor, and G4. An official channel version posted that same day has since accumulated over 2.4 million views.

It also became a technical benchmark. Nyan Cat was ported to graphing calculators, oscilloscopes, LED matrices, Minecraft, and countless demoscene projects — a standard “can it run this” test for hobbyist hardware.

Rights, lawsuits, and a $500,000 sale

Torres has had to defend the work repeatedly. A June 2011 YouTube copyright claim falsely made in his name was resolved after he filed a counter-notice. In 2013, Torres and Charlie Schmidt — the creator of Keyboard Cat — jointly sued Warner Bros. over the unauthorised use of both characters in the game Scribblenauts; the case settled on undisclosed terms.

On February 18, 2021, Torres sold an NFT of Nyan Cat on the platform Foundation for 300 ETH, worth roughly $587,000 at the time. The sale is widely credited with kicking off the 2021 wave of meme NFT auctions, including Disaster Girl two months later.

Notable examples & variations

• The ten-hour version and its many extended cousins.
• Hardware and demoscene ports.
• Regional variants using different national foods and music.
• Game cameos and officially licensed appearances.
• The 2021 NFT and the auction wave it started.

Legacy / cultural impact

Nyan Cat is one of the small number of memes that functions as a historical marker. It belongs unmistakably to 2011 — to a web of GIFs, YouTube loops, and Tumblr reblogs, before short-form video and algorithmic feeds.

Its creator’s trajectory is also unusually instructive. Torres spent a decade defending an image he made for a charity drawing session, and eventually converted it into a significant sum on his own terms — one of the few early meme creators to end up in control of their own work.