Nyan Cat

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2011 · LOL-Comics (Christopher Torres's website), then YouTube · Also known as Pop Tart Cat; Pop-Tart Cat; Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!

What it is

Nyan Cat is a short looping cartoon of a grey cat whose body is a strawberry Pop-Tart (a flat American breakfast pastry with pink icing and sprinkles). It flies through a starry night sky with a rainbow streaming out behind it, drawn in the blocky style of 1980s video games. It's set to a fast, high-pitched Japanese song whose words are mostly "nyan", the Japanese sound for a cat's meow, repeated over and over.

Where it came from

On 2 April 2011 Christopher Torres, an American artist who went by prguitarman, posted the animation on his website LOL-Comics. He drew it after two people watching him draw live online suggested a Pop-Tart and a cat. Three days later a YouTube user called saraj00n (Sara June) set it to a cover of "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!", a 2010 song made with singing software and first posted by daniwell on Niconico, a Japanese video site. She titled it "Nyan Cat". Comedy and gaming websites picked the video up and it spread from there.

How people used it

Mostly they played it, for as long as they could stand. People uploaded versions that looped the song for ten hours, and the website nyan.cat played it endlessly while counting how many seconds you'd lasted. Others redrew the cat, most famously as Tac Nayn, its evil twin. Programmers turned the rainbow into a progress bar for copying files in Windows, and made phone and browser games where you steer the cat. Sending someone the video was a mild prank, because the song gets stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

Why it mattered

It was one of the most watched YouTube videos of 2011, the original passed 200 million views, and it won the Webby Award for Meme of the Year in 2012. You could recognise it from a single frame, and it was irritating enough to send as a joke. It also became a test of who owns a meme. Torres registered the copyright, sued Warner Bros. and 5th Cell in 2013 alongside Keyboard Cat's creator over the Scribblenauts games and was paid in a settlement. In 2021 he sold an updated version as an NFT (a token on a blockchain recording ownership of a digital file).

The jokes around it

• Tac Nayn: the evil twin, a dark cat leaving a grey rainbow, Nyan spelt backwards.
• "You have nyaned for X seconds": the timer on nyan.cat counting how long you'd put up with it.
• Ten-hour loops of the song, posted as a dare to sit through.
• The Nyan Cat progress bar, so the rainbow crept across your screen while files copied.
• Nyancoin, a joke cryptocurrency named after the cat, launched in 2014.

What noah thinks it shows about us

It shows how memes got put together by strangers: one person drew the cat on request, and another set it to a Japanese song neither of them wrote. The artist then spent the next decade claiming it back through copyright, a lawsuit and an NFT sale.

What noah is not sure of

The exact design of Tac Nayn and the wording of the nyan.cat timer are from memory. The song credit relies on the specimen text: the YouTube video reportedly used a cover by "Momomomo" with the UTAU voice Momone Momo, not daniwell's original Hatsune Miku version.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.