Definitive Nyan Cat 8-bit pixel art of grey cat with Pop-Tart body flying through space with rainbow.

Nyan Cat

2011video/animationclassic

Published March 10, 2026 · Updated March 12, 2026

Also known as: Nyan Cat Meme

Nyan Cat is an 8-bit animated GIF of a cat with a cherry Pop-Tart body flying through space, trailing a rainbow, set to the endlessly looping Japanese Vocaloid song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" by daniwellP. Artist Christopher Torres created the animation during a Red Cross charity livestream on April 2, 2011; three days later YouTuber saraj00n paired it with the song, and the combination quickly became one of the biggest viral memes of the early 2010s. The original video pulled in over 205 million YouTube views and sparked games, merchandise, a Webby Award, and a landmark NFT sale worth nearly $600,000.

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Overview

Nyan Cat, a pixel-art animation of a gray cat with a cherry Pop-Tart for a body, zooming through a star-filled sky while leaving a bright rainbow trail behind it. The animation loops endlessly, paired with the high-energy Japanese Vocaloid track "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" by daniwellP3. "Nyan" is the Japanese onomatopoeia for a cat's meow, the equivalent of "meow" in English5.

The character's design is deliberately simple: big eyes, a cheerful expression, stubby legs that appear to run mid-flight, and a rectangular pastry torso in pink with sprinkles. That simplicity made Nyan Cat instantly recognizable and easy to remix. The whole package, cute cat plus catchy music plus hypnotic loop, created something weirdly addictive. People would leave the video running just to see how long they could stand it2.

Originally, the character was also called "Pop Tart Cat" before the internet collectively decided on Nyan Cat after saraj00n's YouTube upload5.

Origin & Background

Platform
4chan/YouTube
Key People
Christopher Torres, Sara June, daniwellP
Date
2011-04

On April 2, 2011, 25-year-old illustrator Christopher Torres of Dallas, Texas was running a charity drawing livestream for the Red Cross when two viewers made separate requests: one said "cat" and the other said "Pop Tart"5. Torres combined the two ideas into a quick doodle of a cat with a pastry body and rainbow trail, based on his own Russian Blue cat named Marty2. That same evening, he turned the sketch into his first-ever 8-bit animation and posted the GIF to his Twitter, Tumblr, and his webcomic site LOL-Comics7.

Three days later, on April 5, 2011, YouTube user saraj00n (real name Sara June) took Torres' animation and set it to "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!," a Vocaloid song by Japanese producer daniwellP5. The track had originally been composed for Hatsune Miku, but the version used in the video was a cover by the UTAU voice Momone Momo, uploaded to Niconico on January 30, 2011 by a user called "Momomomo"5. Saraj00n titled the upload "Nyan Cat," and it hit one million views within two weeks4.

Torres had no grand plans for the GIF. He'd used it as his Twitter avatar and moved on. Then overnight his inbox filled with hundreds of emails and the view counter kept climbing. As he told Trend & Chaos in 2021: "It was born out of pure randomness and love for everything cats, space, and the Internet"7.

How It Spread

By April 10, 2011, Nyan Cat had been picked up by Memebase, BuzzFeed, Tumblr, and Facebook4. Two days later, the Tosh.0 blog, CollegeHumor, and G4TV all posted about it9. Business Insider ranked the video ninth in its top ten viral videos for April 2011, with 7.2 million total views that month5.

One early driver of spread was a comment on the original video by YouTuber xDaZJMx, who told viewers to play Slipknot's "Psychosocial" music video (muted) alongside the Nyan Cat audio. The stunt worked. Tens of thousands of users flooded Slipknot's video with "NYANNYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYA" comments, confusing the metal band's fanbase and dragging Nyan Cat into a completely different corner of YouTube4.

On April 13, the site nyan.cat launched, originally as an unauthorized knockoff called "Toast Cat" that swapped the Pop-Tart for toast2. Torres criticized it as plagiarized, but by 2012 he'd gained control of the domain5. The site turned into a landing page where visitors watch the loop and rack up a "nyan time" score, with high-scorers displayed on an arcade-style leaderboard2.

Sprint featured Nyan Cat in its Nexus 4G "Cats" commercial4. Remixes flooded YouTube in every genre imaginable. Fan-made games started appearing, including "Nyan Cat: Lost in Space" for iOS and Android, "Snake Nyan Cat," and a Robot Unicorn Attack variant called "Nyanicorn"4. Someone even built a working NES tech demo of Nyan Cat that ran on original hardware emulators4.

By the end of 2011, the video was the fifth most-viewed YouTube video of the year5. It kept climbing, eventually passing 205 million views by May 20235.

Platforms

YouTubeTumblrTwitterForums

Timeline

2014-01-01

An officially licensed cryptocurrency called Nyancoin launched with the domain nyanco.in, making Nyan Cat one of the earliest memes to inspire its own digital currency.

2021-02-01

Torres remastered the original GIF for its 10th anniversary and minted it as an NFT — a 24-hour auction on Foundation spiraled from 3 ETH to 300 ETH (roughly $590,000).

2023-11-01

The original saraj00n YouTube channel took down the Nyan Cat video and posted a call to free Palestine, changing its bio to "the meme you seek has been forcibly displaced" — Torres moved the video to his own channel.

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