Nyan Cat: Eight Bits of Cat, One Pop-Tart, Infinite Rainbow

In April 2011, an illustrator named Chris Torres drew a pixel cat with the body of a strawberry Pop-Tart, as a request during a charity fundraising stream. He posted the animation. It was, at that point, a small looping GIF of a cat with a pastry torso.

Within days somebody else had put it over a sped-up Japanese vocal track, uploaded the result to YouTube, and created one of the most reliably infuriating and beloved objects on the internet.

The Anatomy of the Thing

Let us be precise about what Nyan Cat actually is, because the details matter. A cat rendered in low-resolution pixel art. Its torso, from the shoulders back, is an uncut frosted toaster pastry with sprinkles. It flies from left to right against a black starfield. Behind it trails a rainbow, in bands, that pulses in time with the music. Its legs move in a way no cat has ever moved. The audio is a looping vocal that says nya at you, forever, and does not stop.

Why it’s weird: none of these elements need each other. Cat, pastry, space, rainbow, Japanese vocal loop. Each is arbitrary. Together they are so specific that no one has ever successfully described Nyan Cat to somebody who has not seen it.

The Collaboration Nobody Arranged

The important structural fact here is that Nyan Cat was assembled by strangers. The artist made a cat. Somebody else brought the song. A third party combined them. None of them were working together, none of them had a plan, and the finished object outlived every individual contribution.

Torres was clear early on about who made the drawing and generous about the rest of it, which spared this meme the long ugly ownership fight that swallowed several of its contemporaries.

The Endurance Contest Era

For a while in 2011 the internet ran on a specific game: how long can you leave Nyan Cat playing. Sites appeared whose entire function was a counter showing how many hours you had endured. People left it running in a browser tab overnight. Offices banned it. There is no upper limit, because the loop is perfect, and that perfection is exactly what makes it unbearable after four minutes.

The Ten Year Anniversary Sale

In February 2021, Torres auctioned a remastered version of the original animation as an NFT. It sold for roughly 300 ether, worth around half a million dollars at the time. He was one of the first meme creators to do it, and the sale kicked off a short strange period in which the people behind a decade of internet images all got the same phone call.

The context is worth stating plainly. For ten years, the person who drew the most recognisable GIF of his generation had earned very little from it while it appeared on merchandise, in games and on television. The sale was less a crypto story than a very late invoice.

Where It Sits Now

Nyan Cat aged better than almost anything from 2011. Part of that is the pixel art, which was already deliberately retro when it was made and therefore cannot date. Part is the loop, which has no beginning or end to feel old. Mostly it is that the thing is genuinely well drawn. Look at the frame timing on the legs. Somebody who could draw made this.

Our advice, unchanged since 2015: play it once, then close the tab. You know what you are like.