Nyan Cat

Nyan nyan nyan nyan nyan nyan nyan nyan nyan nyan nyan nyan nyan nyan nyan nyan.

On April 2, 2011, illustrator Chris Torres posted a GIF animation to his LOL-COMICS website. It featured a gray cat with a Pop-Tart for a body, flying through space and leaving a rainbow trail behind it. Three days later, YouTuber saraj00n combined the animation with a Japanese Vocaloid song—an earworm of pure, distilled "nyan."

The internet lost its collective mind.

Within days, Nyan Cat had spread across every platform that existed in 2011. The original video ran for over three minutes of uninterrupted nyan-ing, and people watched the whole thing. Some left it running for hours. There were 10-hour versions. There were Nyan Cat flight simulators. There were dubstep remixes, metal covers, and a website that tracked how long you could endure the nyanning.

Chris Torres based the animation on his own cat, Marty, a Russian Blue who probably had no idea he would become one of the most recognizable felines in internet history. The Pop-Tart body was suggested during a charity livestream—someone in chat wanted him to draw a Pop-Tart, another wanted a cat, and Torres delivered both.

Nyan Cat was pure 2011: whimsical, colorful, and aggressively meaningless. It asked nothing of you except to watch a cat fly through space trailing rainbows while an eight-bit song burrowed into your brain forever.

The meme faded by late 2011, but experienced a resurrection in 2021 when Torres sold the original GIF as an NFT for nearly $600,000. Marty the cat had the last laugh.

Nyan forever, sweet prince. Nyan forever.