Nyan Cat at 15: The Story Behind the Rainbow Pop-Tart

A gray cat with the body of a toaster pastry flies through space, leaves a rainbow behind it, and never arrives anywhere. That is the whole thing. Fifteen years after it appeared, Nyan Cat is still one of the most recognizable images the internet has produced, and the Nyan Cat history behind it is stranger and more specific than the loop suggests. It involves a Japanese earthquake, a Vocaloid song nobody outside Niconico had heard, a Russian Blue named Marty, a copyright lawsuit against Warner Bros., and a GIF that later sold for roughly 587,000 dollars.

Table of Contents

• Nyan Cat History Begins With an Earthquake and a Livestream
• The Song Came From a Vocaloid Scene, Not From a Cat
• April 5, 2011: The Day Somebody Put the Two Together
• The Loop Was the Product
• What Nyan Cat History Says About Who Owns a Meme
• The 300 ETH Sale That Turned a GIF Into an Asset
• Why It Still Works at Fifteen
• FAQ

Nyan Cat History Begins With an Earthquake and a Livestream

On March 11, 2011, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami hit northeastern Japan. In the weeks that followed, a Dallas illustrator named Christopher Torres, who posted online as prguitarman, ran a week of donation art livestreams: viewers tipped the American Red Cross, and he drew whatever they asked for. The whole run raised around 100 dollars. It was, by any measure, a small gesture.

During one session, two different people in chat threw out two unrelated suggestions. One wanted a cat. One wanted a Pop-Tart. Torres did what any sensible person does with two prompts and no tiebreaker: he drew both at once. The result was a cat with a toaster pastry for a torso and rainbows coming out of it in several directions.

Turning that sketch into an animation took him more than six hours. He has said he built it in Macromedia Fireworks, a program he had been using since 2001, on a canvas roughly 70 pixels square. That constraint matters more than it sounds. The tiny canvas forced a design with no fine detail, no shading, and no text, which is exactly why the image survived a decade of being re-encoded, screenshotted, embroidered, and stuck on phone cases without losing anything.

He posted it on April 2, 2011, on LOL-Comics, his daily comics site. He called it Pop Tart Cat. It was not called Nyan Cat yet, because the part that gave it that name had not been attached.

Who Marty Was

The cat in the drawing was not generic. Torres adopted two cats in December 2010, a Russian Blue named Marty and a second cat named Buster. Marty is the one in the animation, and if you have ever wondered why the meme cat is gray rather than orange or tabby, that is the answer. Buster died of feline infectious peritonitis, a viral disease that is usually fatal in cats. Marty died of the same illness on November 1, 2012. For a while afterward, the default animation on the nyan.cat website was replaced with a version fans called Sad Nyan Cat.

It is a detail most people never learn, and it changes the texture of the thing. The most relentlessly cheerful loop on the internet is a portrait of a cat who did not make it to two years old.

The Song Came From a Vocaloid Scene, Not From a Cat

The audio has its own separate history, and it started earlier. On July 25, 2010, a Japanese producer using the name daniwell uploaded a track called “Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!” to Niconico, Japan’s video platform. It was made with Hatsune Miku, the synthetic vocal software marketed as a turquoise-haired character, which by then had an enormous amateur music scene around it.

In late January 2011, another user reworked the song using UTAU, a free vocal synthesis tool, with the voicebank Momone Momo. That voicebank is built from recordings of a Japanese woman named Momoko Fujimoto. The UTAU version pushed the vocal higher and rounder, into the register that most people now hear in their heads when they think of the meme.

So the song and the picture were made by different people, in different countries, in different years, for different reasons. Neither one went viral on its own. This is a normal pattern in internet meme history: the artifact that travels is usually a collision, not a creation.

April 5, 2011: The Day Somebody Put the Two Together

Three days after Torres posted the GIF, a YouTube user going by saraj00n, real name Sara June, set the animation to the Momone Momo version of the song and uploaded it under the title “Nyan Cat.” That upload is the version that broke. It passed a million views inside two weeks.

By April 10 and the days immediately after, the video had been picked up by BuzzFeed, Tumblr, Facebook, CollegeHumor, and Comedy Central’s Tosh.0. YouTube’s own year-end list ranked it the fifth most viewed video on the platform for all of 2011. The number one slot that year went to Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” which tells you a lot about what 2011 was like. The original upload eventually crossed 200 million views.

Torres did not upload the video that made him famous. Somebody else did, using his art, with a stranger’s song. He spent the next several years dealing with the consequences of that, which we will get to.

The Loop Was the Product

On April 13, 2011, eight days after the YouTube upload, the site nyan.cat went live with a single feature: non-stop Nyan Cat, with a counter tracking how long you had left it running. A rain-themed variant appeared the next day on a separate site. Within a week, the meme had turned into infrastructure.

YouTube itself joined in. On June 16, 2011, the site quietly enabled a custom video progress bar that turned the scrubber into a flying Nyan Cat with a rainbow trail. A platform with hundreds of millions of users shipped an easter egg for a two-month-old GIF about a cat made of breakfast.

It also got used as a weapon. On May 29, 2011, the hacking group LulzSec broke into PBS servers and left Nyan Cat imagery behind as a calling card. That is a specific kind of cultural status: the image had become shorthand for “you have been made to look ridiculous,” which is a job memes have done since long before the web.

Why an Infinite Loop Beat a Punchline

Most memes of that era were static images with captions. The image macro format ran on a joke you read once and then forwarded. Nyan Cat had no caption, no punchline, and nothing to read. It ran on duration instead. The content was the fact that it did not stop, which converted viewing into an endurance sport. People uploaded ten-hour versions. Then hundred-hour versions. The joke was your own tolerance.

The lack of text also made it stateless across languages. A caption meme needs translation, or at least literacy in the source language. A silent looping cat needs neither, which is part of why the Japanese song, the American drawing, and the global audience never noticed the seams. The same borderless quality shows up in Longcat, which crossed over from Japanese imageboards to the English-speaking web without anyone bothering to translate anything.

What Nyan Cat History Says About Who Owns a Meme

Here is the part that gets left out of the nostalgia posts. Torres has said he spent roughly the first year and a half after the meme broke fighting for ownership of his own drawing, while other parties tried to register trademarks on it and merchandise sellers printed it without asking. Having made the thing turned out to be legally weaker than having filed paperwork about the thing.

In April 2013, Torres and Charles Schmidt, the man behind Keyboard Cat, jointly sued 5th Cell and Warner Bros. over the appearance of both characters in the Scribblenauts games without license or payment. The case settled in September 2013. The terms were not disclosed, but both creators were compensated for the use of their characters. It is one of the few times a meme creator has extracted money from a major publisher through the courts rather than through goodwill.

It kept happening. On June 28, 2016, Sum 41 released the music video for “Fake My Own Death,” a montage of internet imagery that included Nyan Cat. Torres found out when it went up. “There are procedures and agreements for when someone wants to use my art commercially, and Sum 41 and Hopeless Records skipped all of the formalities that other brands have highly sought Nyan Cat out for,” he said at the time. His team reached out to the band, the director, and the label, and got no reply.

The Meme Manager Nobody Expected to Exist

Torres worked with Ben Lashes, a former musician who built an actual profession out of representing meme characters. Lashes also managed Keyboard Cat and later Grumpy Cat, whose licensing operation became the most commercially aggressive cat property the internet has produced. The existence of a “meme manager” job title is itself a piece of internet history, and it came directly from the fact that early creators like Torres had no idea what they were sitting on until other people started selling it.

The pattern has not gone away. In 2026, KC Green went after an AI startup that used his “This Is Fine” dog in a subway ad campaign, which we covered when it happened. Thirteen years after the Scribblenauts settlement, companies are still testing whether meme creators will bother to sue.

The 300 ETH Sale That Turned a GIF Into an Asset

For the tenth anniversary in 2021, Torres made a remastered version of the animation and put it up for auction as an NFT on Foundation, a crypto art platform that had launched two weeks earlier. Bidding opened on February 11. It closed on February 18 at 300 ETH, worth roughly 587,000 dollars at the time.

Torres has said he expected five or ten ETH and watched the final hour turn into a bidding war. The sale landed at the start of the 2021 NFT frenzy, and it got read as proof that the “meme economy” was real. Whatever you think of that market, and there is plenty to think, the sale did establish one thing in public: a decade after the fact, the person who actually drew the cat was the one who got paid for it. Given how the first ten years went, that is not a small reversal.

Why It Still Works at Fifteen

Most 2011 memes are dead or embarrassing. Nyan Cat is neither, and the reason is structural. It has no reference to a news event, no celebrity, no slang, and no joke that ages. Strip away everything and you have a cat, a color spectrum, and repetition, three things that were working on human attention long before broadband.

It also sits at a hinge point. Before it, the dominant format was the captioned still image passed around imageboards like 4chan. After it, the dominant format was the short looping video with audio, which is the entire architecture of TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. Nyan Cat did not cause that shift, but it was one of the first things to demonstrate that a fifteen-second loop with a song attached could out-travel almost anything else on the web. The same trick powers Rickrolling, which is also a video with a song that refuses to die.

And cats keep winning. Nyan Cat sits roughly in the middle of a line that runs from Victorian photographers staging kittens on cabinet cards to whatever the algorithm is pushing this week, a line we walked through in our complete history of cat memes. The technology changed six times. The subject did not change once.

FAQ

Who created Nyan Cat?

Illustrator Christopher Torres, known online as prguitarman, drew and animated the character and posted it on April 2, 2011, under the name Pop Tart Cat. The viral video version was assembled and uploaded three days later by a different person, YouTube user saraj00n, who added the song.

What is the Nyan Cat song?

It is a UTAU cover of “Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!”, a track uploaded to Niconico on July 25, 2010 by the Japanese producer daniwell using Hatsune Miku. The version in the meme uses the Momone Momo voicebank, recorded from a woman named Momoko Fujimoto, and appeared in January 2011.

Was Nyan Cat based on a real cat?

Yes. The design came from Marty, a Russian Blue that Torres adopted in December 2010. Marty died of feline infectious peritonitis on November 1, 2012, and the nyan.cat site briefly switched its default animation to a mourning version.

How much did the Nyan Cat NFT sell for?

300 ETH, about 587,000 dollars at the time. The auction ran on Foundation and closed on February 18, 2021, timed to the meme’s tenth anniversary.

Did anyone get sued over Nyan Cat?

Torres and Keyboard Cat creator Charles Schmidt sued 5th Cell and Warner Bros. in April 2013 over the characters appearing in Scribblenauts without permission. The case settled that September, with both creators paid an undisclosed amount.

The Rainbow Has a Paper Trail

Fifteen years on, the loop looks like it was always inevitable. It was not. It needed a Japanese disaster relief stream, a Vocaloid track from a different year, a stranger with editing software, and a gray cat who lived less than two years. Then it needed a decade of legal work to establish that somebody made it. The internet is very good at turning specific things into ambient ones. Occasionally it is worth reversing that, and remembering that the cat had a name.

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