All Your Base Are Belong to Us
Few internet phrases have achieved the legendary status quite like "All your base are belong to us".
Lets go back to around July 1991, when Toaplan, a Japanese video game company, releases an arcade port from 1989 called Zero Wing for the Sega Mega Drive.
Now, I'm not saying it was destined for greatness based on its gameplay alone (sorry, Zero Wing fans), but little did they know they were about to strike accidental gold.
When it came time to translate the game's opening cutscene from Japanese to English, something... "magical" happened.
The result?
Let's break it down.
Here's the original Japanese versus the, "creative" English translation:
> Japanese: CATS：連邦政府れんぽうせいふ軍ぐんのご協力きょうりょくにより、君達きみたちの基地きちは、全すべてCATSがいただいた
> > Literal English: CATS: With the help of Federation government forces, CATS has taken all of your bases.
> > Zero Wing English: CATS: All your base are belong to us.
Thanks to Toaplan's bankruptcy shortly after the game's release, the identity of our heroic translator remains a mystery.
Somewhere out there, there's an unsung hero (or perhaps an accidental supervillain) who changed the course of internet history without even knowing it.
From Gaming Obscurity to Frequent Use
For a while, this little gem of broken English stayed mainly in the depths of gaming obscurity.
But you know how the internet is(was?) – always digging up buried treasure and turning it into memes.
Fast forward to around 1999, and our beloved phrase started making the rounds in gaming forums and chat rooms.
It was like a secret handshake for the digitally savvy. "All your base are belong to us," one gamer would type, and suddenly, friendships were forged, and inside jokes were born.
In 2000, a part time DJ in Kansas made a techno song based on it:
But the final catalyst?
That came around 2001 when some beautiful genius created a Flash animation set to that same catchy techno beat, featuring the mistranslated phrase.
Suddenly, it wasn't just the gaming community giggling anymore – the entire internet was having a collective "What in the name of broken English is going on here?" moment.
As one internet user of the time eloquently put it: "When I first saw that 'All Your Base' video, I thought I was having a stroke. Then I realized it was just the internet being the internet."
Before we knew it, "All your base" had infiltrated every corner of the web, and a new era of internet culture history was born.
