In AD 2101, war was beginning. What happened? Well, you see, someone set us up the bomb. We get signal, and then all of a sudden, this guy named CATS—not to be confused with the doctor—shows up and declares: "All your base are belong to us."
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the story of the meme that basically defined what memes were going to be.
One of the first websites I remember looking at regularly back in the day was engrish.com. It was made all the way back in 1996 and still exists to this day, cataloging all of the funny, misused English language and Asian products and whatnot. Some of it's awkward mistranslations and misspellings; sometimes it's unintentional puns; and other times it's just pure nonsense.
The mirror image of an American who gets a kanji tattoo thinking it's, like, "beautiful, delicate flower" or something like that—but really, it says "Johnny Poopoo Pants" in Chinese.
For example: you got this sweater that says "crap your hands"; or this box that says "Thunder Crap"; you got this Korean singer instructing the audience to "crap their hands." Honestly, we could do an hour here on just "crap" alone.
You got products with names like "chocolate colon," "creamy ball," "chemical fertilizer."
But, I think the best stuff is when they're actually explaining things in-depth, like this bear on a seat cushion that's telling you its life story: "I was born in Cicago. My mother is Barbara. Please make me clean because I always want it to be clean sometimes."
Or how about this sign warning dogs not to pee on the grass: "Refusal of pet's piss!! Piss make me like this. Piss make me die."? And of course, who can forget the classic graffiti: "Fack You Man"?
Now, of course, with Japanese developers dominating the video game industry from the '80s onward, for a lot of us, our first exposure to "engrish" was video games. I mean, just look at the ending from Ghostbusters: "Conglaturation!!! You have completed a great game. And prooved the justice of our culture. Now go and rest our heroes!"
Granted, I imagine that most of the people who played the Ghostbusters game didn't play it long enough to see that.
In the mid-to-late '90s, the internet was just full of retro gaming nostalgia websites, and a lot of these famous mistranslations were becoming memes on these websites before peopre were calling—did I really say 'peopre' in the English section? Ah, fuck.
For the online retro gaming community of the '90s, these were memes before people were calling them memes. Like in Pro Wrestling, you got: "A Winner is You," Metal Gear: "I Feel Asleep," Final Fantasy VII: "This Guy Are Sick." And of course, if you're going to talk about "engrish" in Final Fantasy games, who could forget Spoony Bard, a turn of phrase that basically became synonymous with the idea of "engrish" in video games.
But as popular as these were, it would wind up being "engrish" from a much more obscure game called Zero Wing that would wind up changing the world as we know it. Zero Wing makes its debut in 1989 as an arcade game. It's a side scrolling shooter similar to R-Type or Gradius. It's never been my type of game, but it was really good for what it was, and the soundtrack rips. But at this point, it's kinda lacking that special sauce that makes it the stuff of legend. It doesn't have the intro, and there's no cut scenes, really.
There's supposedly a story of some kind, but really, it just had this promotional poster that says: "Catch, Shoot, Beat Them Down," which sounds more like God's Hate lyrics than the plot to a video game.
However, this game does have a quasi-ending before the game repeats itself, and that ending gives us a taste of what's to come in the future.
Congratulation!!
A.D. 2111.
All bases of Cats were destroyed.
It seems to be peaceful.
But it is incorrect.
Cats is still alive.
Zig-01 must fight against Cats again.
And down with them completely! Good luck.
It wouldn't be until 1991 for the European Mega Drive release that the intro would be introduced. The incredible voice acting that we all know and love isn't there, but that legendary "engrish" sure was. But, as I said before, this thing was relatively common. So how does the intro to the Mega Drive version of Zero Wing—a port that never even came out in the US—how is that the one that becomes the most viral thing ever to this point, as opposed to any other more popular game, to the point where they're talking about it on the news?
It starts with a gif. Although when you went on those retro game sites, you're mostly looking at screenshots. Some games had longer cut scenes that were worth looking at. The internet was slow, and video was a huge pain in the ass at this point. Video can sometimes be really expensive to have on a website. At this point in time, people are getting nailed left and right with insane surprise hosting costs. It was much easier to spread this stuff as an animated gif.
Specifically, the one I remember so vividly was the intro to Monster Party. Every time I came across that gif, I would wind up cry-laughing. Like, I look at it now and it's not that funny to me anymore. But back then, something about the monster shooting down, the kids, like, looking up, he's like, "That's a star... no, it's a monster." Then the monster's like, "I'm Burt!" Then the kid had a monster fall in front of him and he's just like, "What's up?"
Well, in 1998, the infamous intro to Zero Wing starts making the rounds this way. According to a history of All Your Base that was maintained at hubert.retrogames.com—a gaming-oriented site that also featured web comics, AIM pranks, and Palm Pilot downloads—the gif first appeared on Rage Games, which would become a site called Whazzat?!, a site dedicated to bizarre video game quotes. Then from this quote site, it makes its way to Zany Video Game Quotes, which, of course, is another website dedicated to zany video game quotes.
And what happens next is probably the thing that sets this sequence of events into motion. On June 5th of the year 2000, after seeing the gif on Zany Video Game Quotes, the webcomic Overclocked posts its 116th episode: "The Zero Wing Dub Project." And you might be like, "what's Overclocked?" So, a lot of you probably know OC Remix or Overclocked Remix, the video game music website. That was a spin off of the webcomic and would become much, much more popular than the comic ever was.
Gamer comics, of course, were all the rage during this time period, but Overclocked distinguished itself with a unique 3D rendered style and a focus on the world of emulation. You can also download emulators on their site—in fact, you can apparently still download them. You can go grab Nesticle off of Overclocked in big 2024, but good luck running it on your computer.
So one day, they publish a comic about legal threats made by the Amiga Corporation. And then after that, we get a voiceover for the notorious Zero Wing intro scene, which refers to "engrish" as SNK Glitch, named for SNK's classic contribution to the genre, like "victoly."
It may seem odd for a webcomic to do this, but they'd actually done it before, with the intro to a different side-scrolling shooter, Rock On—be warned, though, that voiceover is a hefty 237kb. As for Overclock's dramatic reading of the Zero Wing intro, you're going to need to download Quicktime 4 to watch that.
This is actually not the voiceover you're familiar with. This one was voiced by the one and only Wayne Newton. Oh, what's that? It doesn't sound like Wayne Newton? It's a little thing called acting.
Although, like many others, people had been aware of this funny mistranslation, after the Overclock dub, it starts to spread even more, and eventually it becomes increasingly popular on the Something Awful forums, with people occasionally quoting it or posting pictures of it. But the nature of All Your Base changes in September. That's when a Something Awful poster named ALF posted a picture of ALF on the phone. Another poster, Starscream, adds a text bubble saying: "all your base are belong to us."
This is the post that changes everything. People are like, "Wait a minute... I could do that, too!" And all of a sudden, they got every character you could possibly think of saying, "All your base are belong to us." This culminates in a big thread in November entitled, "ALL YUOR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!!" And it's just pages upon pages of All Your Base images.
And as the Something Awful thread is gaining momentum, it breaches containment and starts to go all around the internet. You got Stile Project making reference to it on Christmas—as we learned in previous videos, Stile Project is excluded from the Internet Archive, but you can see forum posts referencing it—and the Something Awful thread is getting linked on other forums. And it's a big hit with a lot of people:
"hahahaha! That's the greatest thread I've ever seen in my life!"
"hahahaha I'm still looking at the thread, I'm crying! I'm laughing so hard I'm crying!! hahahaha"
"hahahaha, I'm gonna crap my pants if I don't stop laughing, hahaha"
And unlike the people on engrish.com, this guy I meant to say "crap." And now once this thread has escaped something awful, now you have other people also saying, "Hey, wait a second. I can make these, too."
All Your Base Are Belong to Us wasn't the first internet meme—I mean, you had stuff like, "Mahir, I Kiss You," "Dancing Baby," "Hamster Dance"—but I think All Your Base might have been the very first internet meme where you had all these people seeing it and then opening up their image editing software and riffing on it.
At least at this scale, it established a framework that we still live by to this day. And at this point, it was still far from as big as it would eventually get. The next big part of the snowball effect, of course, is the song. You know the song, "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" by The Laziest Men on Mars, which is a remix of the intro music for the Mega Drive Zero Wing.
Back in the day, I thought this title is because the robots, they're gabbing too much—they're talking a bunch of nonsense. Then I learned that Gabber is actually the music that the song is, which is a subgenre of hardcore, which was confusing to me back then because, you know, I hear hardcore and I'm like, "oh, you mean Billy Club Sandwich, Sworn enemy, Everybody Gets Hurt and mighty, mighty, Irate." But then you listen to it and it's like, untz untz untz. It's cool, but it's got the same name and it's not the same thing. I feel like a lot of you probably had the same confusion back in the day.
The Laziest Men on Mars was a project by a frequent Something Awful poster named JRR. And he posted the song to mp3.com along with some of his other tracks: Superfly's Johnson (Suck It Down), which is a parody of John Ramero's Daikatana, and We Are Something Awful, which he described as "VERY, VERY BAD."
When looking for more information about JRR and his music, I came across some unfortunate news in the thread about Something Awful founder lowtax's death a couple of years ago. Apparently JRR—identified by copyright information as Jeffrey Ray Roberts—had passed away on September 21st, 2011. After this was discovered, a few people went to his obituary page and signed his guest book to share memories about how his music made them feel.
I just learned about his passing. Before today, I was not aware he was the one who did "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" aka "The All Your Base Song". That song always takes me back to a happy time during my early college years, back when the Internet was still a giant playground - a carefree place of harmless, joyous fun. My condolences for your loss. Que Dios lo tenga en su santa gloria.
If you'd like to take a moment to appreciate his work, all of the Laziest Men on Mars songs were uploaded to the Internet Archive in May, just a few months before his untimely death.
At this time, we're still in that period of every single gaming adjacent forum having their own All Your Base thread. And one of the biggest would be made by a user named Bad_CRC on the TribalWar forums, a site that was dedicated to the Tribes games. An interesting point from Hubert's write-up, too, he notes that a lot of people mistakenly think that the meme originated there—and, actually, when I was first researching this video, it started to seem like that might have been true, because everything you find points back to the Tribes community. I had seen people say it was from Something Awful, but, you know, in this period of time, you could say that about 99% of things and you'd be right. So people could have just assumed. But what actually happened was first the Something Awful thread started to glitch out. Then a mod got hacked and deleted the first page. This basically made it impossible to find anymore. So while the original Something Awful thread is ruined now, Bad_CRC's TribalWar thread is flourishing. The archived version of this post I'm looking at has a counter at over 20,000 views, which is absolutely insane for 2001, and it very quickly balloons to like 60,000.
And now in absence of the Something Awful thread, it's the TribalWars thread that's getting shared all over the place. There's a little bit of an undercurrent of people being like, "Hey, you're stealing valor from Something Awful." And there were people there who were taking images from Something Awful and claiming that they made it. But when asked if he came up with the idea, Bad_CRC would just say that he saw it and thought it was fun and ran with it. Ultimately, though, it would be Bad_CRC who made this thing go supernova huge because he's the one that posted the video to Newgrounds. That wasn't the first upload of the video—you can see people in the thread making references to it earlier—but it was on February 16th of 2001 that the Newgrounds post is made: "all yor base r blong 2 us."
This song is a parody of the poorly translated intro to Zero Wing for the Sega Genesis. The images were made by members of a Starsiege Tribes forum.
It's really mind-blowing to see those first few comments completely unaware of what this would eventually become.
Feckin' hillarious! If i could give a 11 for humor i would. That was a damn fuckin movie! "All your base are belong to us". Haha.
This is TOO FUNNY! It should be removed! (j/k)
This is one of the few portal entries that actually made me laugh. Those pictures are SO FUNNY. I am still laughing right now just thinking about it. Is that some old english-translated japanese game? Please respond. THAT WAS THE GREATEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME! I GAVE IT A 5! IT BELONGS IN THE TOP 10!!!
I remember that when this video was uploaded to Newgrounds, at that time, I was completely unaware of the All Your Base meme. I think it's because when I was looking at those classic gaming websites and going to their weird quote sections, I was more focused on finding NES stuff that I hadn't seen before. With other consoles like SNES, Genesis, PlayStation, I was more focused on laughing at stuff I already knew. And having no knowledge of it before made it hit even harder, because it was this humor that I was already deeply entrenched in, but this specific one was brand new to me, and it was taken to a level it just hadn't been done before.
This came out and I watched it over and over again and sent it to anyone I knew who might even vaguely be interested in it. I would keep coming back to it.
This kept me amused for weeks, if not months. And a lot would happen in those next few weeks. A joke that was once relegated to niche corners of the internet had suddenly become the most mainstream internet joke in history in nearly an instant. At this point, it's completely inescapable online, and it's around offline, too. This might have been the first time I remember people saying meme words in real life. And of course, there were people who felt some kind of way this. The most well-known example is probably Salamando's Stove, a classic gaming-comedy website that described itself as "a nexus of pure entertainment. Quite the Baskin Robbins of amusing web pages, if by 31 flavors you actually mean several different ways of jerking pure humor in your faces." He published a tongue-in-cheek article called the "Death of Zero Wing."
Today is a sad day in the Video Game community. For, after well over a year of tireless service bringing us bad Engrish and laughable grammer, it's time to bury one of our classic joke staples: Zero Wing. It has served us well.
It's wild to think in 2024, a time where a meme will get created and die over the course of three hours. To think that there used to be a time where people might be like, "welp, they just ruined our meme that we enjoyed for several years by making it mainstream." And the article features a dialog between characters talking about the situation.
Pipe down or I'll lock you in the basement with a middle-aged pervert ghost. Ahem. Anyway, I found this page that had the opening from Zero Wing in all its glory, complete with wonderful lines like "WHAT YOU SAY !!" and "FOR GREAT JUSTIC." Since that time, Zero Wing has become overused [and that links to the flash video] to the point where it's no longer funny and is, indeed merely a sad, abused joke. It's sold out and gone mainstream.
Like Seanbaby!
Quiet. Anyway, stupid, random, obscure inside-jokes revolving around video games should be anything but mainstream. But the final straw in determining that this entire thing is overused, overplayed, and generally now lame:
[photo of Cliff Bleszinski]
This is Cliff Belzinski, or Cliffy B. When a lamer like this
Lamer! I've not thought about that word in, probably like, 23 years or so.
When a lamer like this starts taking her jokes, it's time to call it a day. So that's why we're here today, to give the Zero Wing an honorable burial.
Then he's got a little tombstone with All Your Base on it.
Funny enough, on the archive of the Laziest Men on Mars songs, there's a comment from 2021 where a guy is talking about how he can't share these songs, otherwise TikTok zoomers will find it and ruin it and it'll destroy JRR's legacy. The internet is very different now, but some things never change.
In any case, if you thought this was mainstream on February 18th when this was published, you ain't seen nothing yet. Over the course of the next several weeks, All Your Base is getting tons of coverage, both online and in print, in places like the San Francisco Chronicle, salon.com, The Register. The Hubert coverage has a pretty comprehensive list. It also gets mentioned by a caller on Loveline baffling Dr. Drew and, kinda, pissing off Adam Carola.
My favorite of all the mainstream coverage, though, is probably the Fox Chicago segment from that March. Before that, we had seen internet stuff acknowledged on TV, like when Mad TV parodied Mahir. But this is the first time I could think of where we're looking at normal people trying to contend with and understand some nonsensical thing from the internet. Like, you have to imagine that the majority of the audience watching this on TV, they're the metaphorical child from the Victorian era, having their brains melted by a time traveler who gave them a Monster Energy drink. Like, the 2024 equivalent to this type of person, even if they're not very online, they still have decades of some kind of context now where you could tell them about Skibidi Toilet, and they might say "Oh, that's stupid," but they can still conceive of something like Skibidi Toilet and how something like that comes to be. They can understand society's path towards Skibidi Toilet. Like, imagine trying to explain a @PROGNOZPOGODI69 Xiaohongshu TikTok to a person who's had an AOL 3.0 free trial disc sitting on their kitchen table, and they're like, "Oh, maybe I'll give it a shot one day." To be fair, though, Fox's Rick Fogel actually did a good job explaining it:
All Your Base Are Belong To Us is the web equivalent of people watching Budweiser commercials and going around and saying, 'Whassup?' to everyone. It's the exact same concept.
The saying actually comes from a popular Japanese video game that was out on the market about 10 years ago called Zero Wing. In a rush to get that game released in this country, the Japanese was translated into English. Bad grammar and all.
You'd think there must be some company out there that would just love to capitalize on it, right?
If it were an ad, if it were, you know, Nike, All Your Base Are Belong To Us and have the swoosh on it, it wouldn't be nearly as appealing. People wouldn't want it.
But they want it now. It's one of the most popular searches on the web. Though, like most underground trends, now that All Your Base Are Belong To Us has hit mainstream, its coolness might be over soon.
Something else I really love about this clip, this is happening before we really had any kinda language to describe this sort of thing. So they're trying to figure out what to call it. We got captions like, "Strange Phrase," and "Cyber Sayings." Honestly, I think we should adopt that nomenclature. I'm a big fan of Cyber Sayings like, "based" and "epic" and "Skibidi Ohio Riz."
I also really enjoyed that one of the meme examples they showed was middle school "anal examination" one. Perfect choice for the local news program that says, "It's 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?" Ultimately, though, these anchors were just having a little bit of fun being some of the first people to try and explain a meme.
But not everyone was having fun. Since All Your Base Are Belong to Us became popular, there had been a few cases of people bringing it into real life. Most of these attempts were pretty light-hearted. You had this one dude who had people like toll booth clerks, In-N-Out burger employees, and a dying man in a hospital posed with an All Your Base Are Belong to Us sign. Interestingly, some of this guy's photos dated back to 1997. You also had an incident where All Your Base Are Belong to Us was written on a building in the Carnegie Mellon University campus.
But on April 1st of 2003, you finally get your first All Your Base Are Belong to Us arrest. Like that other guy, a bunch of guys in Sturgis, Michigan made a bunch of All Your Base Are Belong to Us signs, and they put them around town. But where they messed up was adding the line that comes after that, "you have no chance to survive, make your time." By and large, the locals had not played Zero Wing, and they thought this was a threat, a threat that was somehow related to the Iraq War. Thus, the seven men responsible were arrested on suspicions of terrorism.
And now, a question you gotta ask—with this being such a far-reaching and a long-lasting internet phenomenon—were the developers aware of it?
It doesn't seem like they specifically talked about the memes that were made, but they have addressed the translation issues. Basically, they didn't actually have a translator. Instead, they just had a guy who worked on exports and overseas business—it's kinda like some kind of Japanese Art Vandelay. So he did the translations, and his English was not great. Zero Wing would actually finally get its first official North American release in 2020 when Retro-bit released physicals of several Toaplan shooting games. This one was just the Mega Drive version, but put on a cartridge. However, in 2022, the game would get an updated version made for Steam—and they changed the intro. For some reason, they kept CATS' dialog in "engrish," but they made the crew talk normal.
Funny enough, the cut scene does explain why. If you pay attention to the flashing monitor in the background, you can see it displaying an error message claiming that the translator is broken.
I guess on some level, there's a bit of artistry in making a choice like that—but it just doesn't hit the same.
Sometimes, things are just better when they're bad.
