Back in the late ’90s, long before Meristation’s crazy German kid or cigar guy blew it up, the internet had its first virals . Specifically, one of the most successful was one of an animated baby dancing on a black background , which is also believed to be the first viral GIF in Internet history . Well, the creators of this meme have met again and have decided to remaster it so that it has a much more current look. Oh, and of course, they’ve put it up for sale as NFT .
The classics are back (in the form of NFTs)
Apparently, the ‘Dancing Baby’ was nothing more than a sample file of what Character Studio, a render engine for Kinetix, the software we now know as Autodesk 3ds Max , was capable of. The sample was created by Michael Girard and Robert Lurye , and had the name ‘sk_baby.max’. However, the one who lit the fuse was Ron Lussier, an animator who worked for LucasArt who decided to retouch the original file and send it to his colleagues by email.
In late 1996, web developer John Woodell created a highly compressed animated GIF from the Lussier file to demonstrate the conversion and capabilities of the CompuServe format—remember, GIF was high-tech at the time. This is how the dancing baby would end up reaching all corners of the Internet, having its own website and even appearing as a recurring joke on the television series Ally McBeal in 1998, which helped the meme to still be made.
It’s been over 25 years, and the original creators of the Dancing Baby have decided to remaster the original file and put it up for sale as NFT on Foundation.app. Of course, the animation is not alone. The group has teamed up with HFA-Studio and released ‘The Dancing Baby Collection’, a series of seven animations including the original image remastered. The six extra pieces have been created by other artists.
Have they arrived too late?
If the second baby refers to ‘el bicho pelao’, we take off our hats.
The collection of dancing babies is currently being auctioned , although it is not having the success that its creators expected, since practically no one is bidding on them .
The NFT market has ground to a halt in recent months. A few months ago, The Wall Street Journal relied on data from NonFungible to publish a study stating that non-fungible token sales had fallen 92% from their all-time high in September 2021. In the same report, it was revealed that the active portfolios of NFTs had decreased by 88%. The same has happened in Google Trends, since there has been an 80% drop in searches for this term.
However, all is not lost. A few days ago, Square Enix got rid of several of its western studios – those responsible for Tomb Raider and Deus Ex – in a very drastic way to obtain liquidity and thus get into the NFT market .
