Popcat

Origin¶

The cat is real and is named Oatmeal, owned by a Twitter user posting as @xbqbw. The source footage, from around mid-October 2020, shows Oatmeal chirping at a bug — mouth snapping into a wide, perfect O. Posted first to Discord, the GIF reached Reddit’s r/MeowIRL on October 9, 2020 and went properly viral on Twitter on October 10.

What made it work was the two-frame structure. Mouth closed, mouth open: a binary that reads as a pop, and that can be looped, timed to audio, or triggered by a click. Almost immediately people were syncing it to music and sound effects.

The clicking game¶

On December 11, 2020, three University of Sheffield students — Rain O’Sullivan, Ed Hails and Freddy Heppell — launched popcat.click. The mechanic is one line long: click the cat, the mouth pops, a counter goes up. The twist was that the site logged each click against the visitor’s country and ranked nations on a global leaderboard.

That single design decision turned a cat GIF into an international competition. The 2021 timeline:

• February 9, 2021 — the game launched an official Twitter account.
• February 10, 2021 — Brazil became the first country past one million clicks, after the account found an audience there.
• April 2021 — a European surge, with Finland topping the leaderboard ahead of its neighbours.
• August 12, 2021 — Taiwan overtook Finland and Sweden to lead the board.
• Mid-August 2021 — sustained three-way competition between Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia, with online communities organising click campaigns and scripts to push their national totals.
• Google Trends listed Popcat as the top trending game of 2021.

Meaning¶

As a reaction, the popping mouth is a beat of pure enthusiasm — hype, emphasis, delight, a visual ”!” with no words attached. It carries no irony and no argument, which is unusual for a meme of its size and much of the reason it travelled so widely.

As a game, it is something stranger: a genuinely competitive activity with no reward, no skill component and no end state, in which entire countries mobilised to click a picture of a cat more times than another country. The leaderboard supplied the only thing the meme was missing — a reason to keep doing it.

Notable uses¶

• Popcat synced to songs, where the mouth pops on the beat.
• Reaction posts using the open-mouth frame alone as an expression of excitement.
• Browser extensions and click scripts built for the leaderboard race.
• National click campaigns organised through forums and social media.

Legacy¶

Popcat belongs to the lineage of pure, low-stakes cat memes that ask nothing of the viewer: Bongo Cat, which drums along to any song; Crying Cat; and further back Longcat and Keyboard Cat. What distinguishes it is the interaction layer. Most memes are watched or reposted; Popcat was played, and briefly turned an idle-clicker into a proxy for national pride. It remains the clearest demonstration that a two-frame animation, given a scoreboard, will hold millions of people’s attention for the better part of a year.