Hampster Dance: The Webpage That Launched a Million Loops (1998)

In 1998, a Canadian art student named Deidre LaCarte built a simple website featuring rows of animated hamster GIFs dancing to a sped-up sample from Disney’s Robin Hood. She meant it as a competition with her sister and friend to see who could attract more web traffic. Within a year, the Hampster Dance page had millions of views and had become one of the first true internet phenomena.

The site was famously misspelled — “hampster” instead of “hamster” — and that typo became part of its charm. Hampster Dance proved that absurdity plus repetition plus a catchy loop could conquer the early web. It was the first meme to feel like a shared joke among everyone online.