The Hampster Dance and the First Viral Pages

The Hampster Dance started as a visitor-count contest between two sisters and a friend, and it got about 60,000 visits in four days in March 1999. The page was a single web page full of dancing animated hamsters set to a sped-up looping song, and it became one of the first viral websites. A Canadian art student named Deidre LaCarte made it on GeoCities in 1997, and it sat almost unnoticed for over a year before people started passing the link around. It landed in a wave of early internet jokes everyone knew, next to the Dancing Baby, All Your Base Are Belong to Us and Badger Badger Badger.

A contest for visitors

LaCarte built the page for her pet hamster, Hampton Hampster. That's where the odd spelling came from, and yes, it stuck. The page was just rows of tiny animated hamster GIFs dancing to a short, sped-up clip of a song called "Whistle Stop" by Roger Miller, which came from Disney's 1973 Robin Hood.

That clip ran only a few seconds, and it played over and over until you closed the window. Many of us never closed the window fast enough.

For a long time, almost nobody visited. Then people started sharing it, and the page exploded. Hardly anyone knew the word viral yet, so it just felt like the whole school had heard the same song by Thursday.

How did things go viral before social media?

Things went viral before social media through email and instant messages, with message boards helping out. Someone found a funny page, pasted the link into an email to friends or family, and those people forwarded it again. Links bounced around AIM and school computer labs, and a whole office might hear the Hampster Dance on someone's speakers by lunch. There was no like button or share count. The only measure was how many times you got sent the same thing.

That chain carried forwarded emails around, and later Homestar Runner.

Did the Hampster Dance really get a song?

The Hampster Dance got a real song of its own, which still feels strange to type. In 2000, the Boomtang Boys released "The Hampsterdance Song," credited to Hampton the Hampster. Because Disney wouldn't allow the original clip, the single used a sound-alike melody. It hit number one in Canada and became one of Radio Disney's most played songs ever. LaCarte never registered hampsterdance.com herself, so another site grabbed the name.

The Dancing Baby

Before the hamsters, there was the Dancing Baby. It started as a 3D animation demo made to show off computer animation software around 1996, and people passed the file around until it was everywhere. It even showed up on the TV show Ally McBeal, dancing through the main character's daydreams. A version set to "Hooked on a Feeling" became the one most people remember.

All your base are belong to us

Then came a sentence that made no sense. "All your base are belong to us" was a badly translated line from the opening of an old video game called Zero Wing. In February 2001, a techno music video using the line was posted on Newgrounds, and the phrase took off. It showed up in photoshopped images and on signs, and once on a TV news ticker. Plenty of people still say it today without knowing where it came from.

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Badger Badger Badger and the dancing banana

In 2003, an animator named Jonti Picking, known online as Weebl, released Badger Badger Badger, a looping Flash cartoon of badgers doing exercises, a mushroom and a snake. It looped forever, and once you heard it, it lived in your head for the rest of the day. Meanwhile, plenty of family computers had a talking purple gorilla called BonziBuddy making its own noise.

A dancing banana singing "It's peanut butter jelly time" became its own meme too, set to a song by the Buckwheat Boyz. It turned up on message boards and then on TV.

Numa Numa and the webcam era

By late 2004, viral videos were starting to replace viral pages. In December of that year, a young man named Gary Brolsma posted a clip of himself lip syncing to "Dragostea din tei," a Romanian pop song by O-Zone, while waving his arms in a desk chair. He called it the Numa Numa Dance, and it spread through Newgrounds and forwarded emails until it seemed like everyone with a computer had watched it.

Earlier that same year, JibJab released "This Land," a cartoon that put the faces of the two presidential candidates on a cutout version of the folk song "This Land Is Your Land." So many people watched and forwarded it that the site struggled to keep up. People watched it at work and in computer labs, often on connections that made the video stop and start every few seconds.

YouTube opened in 2005, and from then on viral clips had a home. The hamsters, the dancing baby and the badgers came first, though. They were made with GIFs and Flash and a lot of patience, and nobody planned for them to spread. Somebody liked a silly page, sent it to five people, and those five sent it to everyone they knew.

The away message you left up all day

Copycat pages with other animals doing the same dance never quite worked, and neither did closing the window fast enough.

Send it to five people

One silly page reached millions of people with no ads and no algorithm, only people sharing what made them laugh. That same goofy energy filled Flash games at lunch and the personal homepages of the time.

FriendCrib has plenty of room for silly. Make a crib, pick a song that loops a little too much, and send the link to a friend with nothing but "lol you have to see this."