Picture a web page packed with hundreds of cartoon hamsters dancing in rows, while the same squeaky, sped-up song plays over and over with no button to turn it off. Millions of people sent it to their friends on purpose.
It was called the Hampster Dance, and it spread around the world years before Facebook or YouTube existed. It started as a contest between sisters and ended with a number one song and a businessman who says he lost almost a million dollars on it.
Hampster Dance at a glance
- Created 1998 by Deidre LaCarte of Nanaimo, British Columbia
- Host GeoCities, a free website service
- The music A sped-up loop of Roger Miller’s “Whistle Stop” from Disney’s Robin Hood (1973)
- Went viral February and March 1999
- Hit single “The Hampsterdance Song,” number one in Canada in July 2000
A bet between sisters
The story starts in Nanaimo, a city on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. In 1998, art student Deidre LaCarte, her sister Melanie and their friend Hazel Steenman each had a page on GeoCities, one of the first free website services. They made a bet over whose page could draw the most visitors by the end of the year.
Melanie had a music page and Hazel had an art page. Deidre built a page about her pet hamster, Hampton. She took four small animated hamster drawings and copied them again and again until the page held 392 of them, all bouncing and spinning in rows. The spelling, hampster with a P, was on purpose.
The song that would not stop
The music came from “Whistle Stop,” the song that plays over the opening credits of Disney’s 1973 animated film Robin Hood. Country singer Roger Miller wrote and performed it. On the Hampster Dance page, a short clip of it was sped up until it sounded high and silly, and it looped nonstop from the moment the page opened.
For months, almost nothing happened. Until early 1999, the page had collected about 800 visits in total, around four a day. That was still enough for Deidre to win the bet.
How it went viral without social media
In February 1999, the link started moving through email. Office workers forwarded it to coworkers, friends forwarded it to friends, and early bloggers posted it. On February 9, 1999, the popular tech news site Slashdot linked to it. By March, the page was getting about 60,000 visits in four days.
Part of the appeal was how annoying it was. A common office prank was to set a coworker’s browser home page to the Hampster Dance, so the song blasted the next time they went online. News outlets covered it, and the site’s managers later claimed hundreds of thousands of visits a day.
All of this happened when the internet was still new to most people. Around that time, only about 41 percent of American adults went online at all.
Where it got messy
Deidre had not registered the matching web address, hampsterdance.com. Someone else did, and an unofficial copy of her site went up there.
Then the music industry got involved. A British electronic group called the Cuban Boys made a track built on the same sped-up “Whistle Stop” clip, called “Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia.” Released as a single in December 1999, it reached number four on the UK singles chart that Christmas. Deidre accused the group of taking her idea.
The official hit single
Deidre’s side answered with an official version. Disney would not allow its original recording to be used, so the Canadian production team the Boomtang Boys re-recorded the melody, added new lyrics and credited the track to Hampton the Hampster.
“The Hampsterdance Song” came out in Canada on June 13, 2000. On July 15, 2000, it debuted at number one on the Canadian singles chart. In the United States, it reached number four on Billboard’s maxi-single sales chart and stayed in the top 50 for 37 weeks. An album, toys and other merchandise followed.
Who ended up with the money
In late 2001, Deidre sold the Hampster Dance rights to Abatis International, a merchandising company in the United States. Its president, Bill Porfido, later said the company lost almost a million dollars trying to turn the hamsters into a children’s entertainment brand. At the time, very few people knew how to make money from a popular website.
The original home of the hamsters is gone too. Yahoo, which bought GeoCities in 1999, shut the service down on October 26, 2009, deleting millions of personal pages. Volunteer archivists copied as much of it as they could before it disappeared, and versions of the Hampster Dance page still live on.
In 2005, the tech site CNET ranked the Hampster Dance number one on its list of the top web fads of all time, ahead of the Dancing Baby and Star Wars Kid. It showed that one person with a free website and a pet hamster could reach millions of strangers. It also showed how quickly the web address, the song and the profits could end up in other hands once the whole internet was sharing it.
