From an old staff tradition to the most famous face on Twitch. This is the story of Kappa.
Streamer dictionary – What does Kappa mean?
From an old staff tradition to the most famous face on Twitch. This is the story of Kappa.
Every internet meme usually comes with its own extraordinary backstory. Kappa is no exception. A face that has become Twitch’s emote flagship since its creation.
Today, it is one of the top 10 most used emotes on the streaming platform and is spammed more than 500,000 times daily in Twitch chats.
How Kappa came to be
Before the official founding of Twitch in 2011, the website had been running under the name Justin.tv as a similar online streaming platform since 2006. During these five years, the team regularly strengthened itself with new employees in order to continue working on the development of the platform.
This is how software engineer Josh Deseno found his way to Justin.tv in 2009. His main task was to develop a chat client for the online streams.
At the company, it was almost considered a tradition for employees to provide their face as emotes on the platform. Deseno thought this would be a good idea and created his own emote from the photo of his employee card.
Besides the picture, however, a creative name was still missing. No problem, thought Deseno, who at the time was mainly interested in Japanese pop culture and mythology. He particularly liked a group of mythical creatures, the so-called Yokai.
They existed in human and animal form and possessed supernatural powers. Among the various species were the so-called Kappa (river child). A reptilian humanoid, which according to stories lived on the waters of Japan.
Already some time after Deseno finished the idea and the concept of the emote, it was used by large parts of the community.
The meaning of Kappa
Actually, the use of the Kappa face as we know it today was not even envisioned in 2009. However, due to Deseno’s perfect smile, it quickly became clear that Kappa would become the perfect emote for sarcastic and ironic statements.
That’s why when people talk nonsense, i.e. troll, they very often end up using the Kappa emote to make it clear that their statement was not meant seriously but was just in fun. Other modifications of the emote are KappaPride, KappaClaus, KappaRoss or Keepo.
Especially when a golden Kappa emote appears in the chat, which is randomly provided to Twitch users for 24 hours, the party is on.
