The Blue Ball Machine first appeared on YTMND in 2005, a community platform where "You're the Man Now, Dog" users create and share meme based web pages. Andorion originally developed the concept, designing a template and sample tiles while inviting community contributions. Hundreds of participants from the Something Awful forums subsequently created the individual images.

Immediately after its creation, the site gained popularity on YTMND, which resulted in various spinoffs, and its own wiki page. It even had a screensaver, which was made in late 2006! The site was created or at least owned by the account of Earthbounder. The site would later stop working, according to archives around 2009.

The site would later be brought to haneke.net from mid-2008, to its demise in early 2017. The site used to be a German "Internetportal" in 2003, and was a red button that opened a pop-up with the text "HANEKE" later that same year. The site later become the Blue Ball Machine that we all know and love from early-mid 2008.

The site exploded in popularity from late 2012, which even appeared on the The Useless Web at one point, according to its list from 2013-2014. The site sadly disappeared in mid-2017. The site is now a nest box live camera from 2021, and still exists in 2025.

However, the YTMND site would be revived in mid-2019, as they switched from Flash to HTML5, which appears to now be maintained by a user called benjabean1. The site reads that the GIF's origin is "... unknown, but it has been used on many YTMNDs before." And the sound is from "Pee Wee's Big Adventure".