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If you’ve looked through a comic book or record shop, been to a convention, spent any time with school children, or cruised through the games section of the app store at any time in the last decade, you’ve seen this cat.
But who it is, how it got here, and why it’s such a normal part of the scenery now is a whole saga.
Nyan Cat beginnings
On April 1st, 2011, webcomic artist Chris Torres did a charity drawing livestream for the Red Cross, and during it asked for requests. One person said “cat” and another said “pop tart!” So he drew this.
He liked it so much that he wanted it as a Twitter avatar. So the following day he pixelated it so it would read in a small little icon format, and reposted it to his Tumblr, and website Lolcomics. It was based on his Russian blue cat, named Marty.
Song
Four days later, on April 5th, YouTuber saraj00n uploaded it as a video, attaching this song as the soundtrack which was already popular online on nicovideo—which is kind of like Japanese YouTube.
In case you’re wondering, “Nyan” is what Japanese speakers say cats say—instead of meow.
Very quickly, it was picked up by nearly every internet news outlet you can think of, including Buzzfeed, Memebase, the Tosh.0 blog, CollegeHumor, and many many more.
Soon shoppers could buy Nyan Cat anything, and it was one of the biggest phenomena ever to come out of a webcomic. That’s the origin of Nyan Cat ubiquity, but why it takes up so much space in the zeitgeist is an incremental thing. It happened over the following years, and there’s no one person or plotline driving it all.
Apart from some merch and a few NFT sales, which we’ll get to, Chris Torres never tried to get total control of his meme once the pop-tart cat was out of the bag. So no list of Nyan Cat moments is going to be comprehensive, but we will make an effort to cover the highlights.
Nyan Cat takes off
On April 13th, just as this rainbow wave was cresting, nyan.cat launched, originally by someone trying to steal the IP by making a knockoff called “Toast Cat.” They wanted to build apps, sell merch, and monetize it without credit or permission. But thankfully by 2012, the site was under Chris’ control.
It’s really just a glorified landing page, where he links to the official everything. But also where users are encouraged just to hang out and watch. The longer you keep the page open, the higher your score goes, and high-scorers are immortalized on an old-school arcade-looking leaderboard.
Today, for superfans and speculators alike, there’s a link cycling through any number of Nyan Cat iterations, and imploring passersby to “adopt an official Nyan Cat NFT today!”
It leads to another website, which is another landing page, directing people to OpenSea, where anyone can buy NFTs of their choosing for cryptocurrency.
LulzSec PBS Hack
At the end of May, just two months after the original post, a hacking group called LulzSec added a page called “lulz” to PBS’s website. The header, which read “FREE BRADLEY MANNING. FUCK FRONTLINE,” was a subtle clue to their motivation.
They were upset about what they viewed as an unfair Frontline episode about WikiLeaks, and in addition to leaking passwords and other identifying information about PBS staffers, they used Nyan Cat art on the new webpage.
Custom Player Bars, and Flash Games
On an unrelated and far lighter note, YouTube itself two weeks later enabled a custom player bar on the Nyan Cat video, which while fun, was really just a short-lived easter egg. It was disabled when they made a global change to the player the following month.
Around the same time, a fan made a custom progress bar for Windows PCs, which changed it from the generic green to a Nyan Cat branded rainbow. A few weeks after that, someone else did a similar thing available at the time for jailbroken iOS devices.
A decade later, when Apple introduced the infamous touchbar on their laptops, another developer took that same idea and ran with it.
Along the way, Nyan Cat flash games were created. Originally only playable online but now available on Android and iOS, anyone who wants to nyan in space on the go is free to do so.
Take Down of the Original Video
In November 2023, the original YouTube channel which combined the animation and the song took down the video and posted another with calls to free Palestine.
When Chris moved it to his channel, the original poster, who has upwards of 300,000 subscribers, changed their bio to say “the meme you seek has been forcibly displaced.”
It’s hard to blame someone with a platform for using it to do what they think is right, but like the Toast Cat guy trying to make a buck off of work that wasn’t his, and the LulzSec hackers trying to make their own statement, ultimately this was yet another example of someone trying to take advantage of it for their own ends, or turn it into something that it’s not—and failing.
Yes, Chris Torres sold a few toys along the way. But at the risk of getting too heavy, the moral of the Nyan Cat story might be that it’s okay and possible for a light and trivial thing to persevere in the face of people who just want to exploit it.
In an interview with The Daily Dot, Chris called Nyan Cat “digital sugar in image form.” He said memes “thrive by keeping them on the internet,” and “not going too hard on them.”
If the omnipresence of his cartoon a decade and a half into its lifespan is anything to go by, he’s right.
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