Nyan Cat (2011) - The Story Behind Mzansi's Viral Memory
A pixel cat with a Pop-Tart body flying through space on a rainbow, looped to a Japanese vocaloid song.
200M+
Peak views
Uploaded 5 April 2011
Date
Meme Web Era
Era
Christopher Torres (art) and daniwell (music)
Creator
When did it go viral?
Nyan Cat was assembled from two separate pieces. Christopher Torres drew the pixel cat in April 2011 for a charity drawing request. A YouTube user then paired the animation with a sped-up vocaloid track by the Japanese producer daniwell. Neither person planned a collaboration. The internet did the editing.
The combined video hit Reddit within days and never left. By mid-2011 it was one of the most reposted images on the early meme web, and it became a benchmark for the whole genre of loop videos that ask nothing of the viewer except a few seconds of attention.
How many views when it peaked?
The original upload passed 200 million views, and the wider ecosystem of ten-hour versions, remixes and game ports pushed the true audience far higher. There is no clean total, because Nyan Cat was never one video. It was a format that anyone could rebuild.
The ten-hour version alone drew tens of millions of views, which says something strange and true about 2011: people genuinely left it running as background noise while they studied, worked or played games.
Why did South Africa love it?
In South Africa, Nyan Cat arrived at the moment when uncapped ADSL started reaching student residences and the first Android handsets landed on prepaid contracts. It was light, it looped, and it did not eat a data bundle in the way a music video did. That mattered a lot in a country where megabytes were counted carefully.
It also fitted the local sense of humour around pure nonsense. Varsity computer labs across Mzansi ran it as a prank on unattended machines. Radio DJs referenced it. The rainbow trail turned up on stickers, phone covers and school books in towns nowhere near a fibre line.
Where is it now? (2026 status)
Torres sold a remastered version as an NFT in February 2021 for about 590 thousand US dollars, which pulled the meme back into headlines a decade after it was drawn. The original video remains online and is still credited as one of the founding documents of internet culture.
As of August 2026 Nyan Cat exists as a permanent reference point. It is used in coding tutorials, in loading screens, in game mods and in explanations of what a meme even is. It has become shorthand for the early, weird, harmless internet.