Cat Bounce: The Website of Bouncing Cats That Won a Webby

Cat Bounce is a single-purpose website where you fling cartoon cats around the screen and watch simulated gravity drag them back down. That is the whole site. It has run at cat-bounce.com since 2012, and it once won a Webby Award for being the weirdest thing on the web.

In brief

• Drag or throw the cats and a small physics engine bounces them with friction, gravity, and velocity: more force means more bounce.
• It was made in 2012 by artist Tara Sinn and rebuilt for modern browsers in 2017 by Nick Hulea.
• It sits in the same one-joke tradition as the sites gathered at The Useless Web.

What Cat Bounce actually does

The idea is complete the moment the page loads. A pile of cat cutouts sits at the bottom of the window, and grabbing one and flinging it sends it tumbling and rebounding off the floor. A "Make It Rain" button drops a fresh shower of cats from the top. There is no score, no level, and no goal, only the small satisfaction of watching things fall and bounce.

The site even offers a gentle warning in its own voice: some cats are bouncier than others, so a lighter touch keeps them from flying off screen. It is a toy that explains its one rule and then gets out of the way.

A physics engine in a cat costume

Underneath the silliness is a real piece of browser code. According to the site's own about page, the cats move with JavaScript that simulates two-dimensional physics, calculating friction, gravity, and velocity from how hard the visitor throws them. It is the same kind of math a game engine uses, pointed at nothing more serious than falling cats. The restraint is the joke: all that motion, in service of a pile of kittens.

Because the whole thing runs in the browser, there is no account to make and no app to install. A visitor can bounce cats for ten seconds or ten minutes and then close the tab with nothing left behind.

Who made it

Cat Bounce was created in 2012 by Tara Sinn, a New York artist who, in the site's words, dabbles in code. The web culture blog Laughing Squid covered it within days of launch, and it went on to be written up by Buzzfeed, Mashable, and Mental Floss, among others. In 2017 the developer Nick Hulea updated it to keep working in modern browsers, and in 2019 it won a Webby Award in the Weirdest Website category.

That mix of a working award and a completely pointless premise is exactly the tension that makes these sites worth keeping. Someone took the craft seriously enough to win, aimed entirely at bouncing cats.

Why a pile of cats keeps working

Cat Bounce endures because it responds to the visitor instead of just playing something back. Every throw produces a slightly different tumble, so the toy never repeats itself in quite the same way, and that small unpredictability is the entire product. It also travels well, since a screenshot of scattered cats explains nothing and the only way to get the joke is to throw one.

That places it alongside other minimal curiosities in the wider boring and unusual web, the same territory catalogued at the Boring Websites hub. Doing one small thing well, and refusing to bolt anything else on, turns out to be a durable way to stay online for over a decade.

FAQ

How do you use Cat Bounce?

Open the page, then drag and throw the cats to bounce them, or press "Make It Rain" to drop a fresh batch. Throw harder for a bigger bounce; there are no other controls to learn.

Who created Cat Bounce and when?

It was made in 2012 by the artist Tara Sinn and updated for modern browsers in 2017 by Nick Hulea, according to the site's about page.

Did Cat Bounce really win an award?

Yes. In 2019 it won a Webby Award in the Weirdest Website category, a rare official trophy for a deliberately pointless page.